“Appalachian Heritage,” a regional literary quarterly published by Berea College, will celebrate its Winter 2007 issue with a reading by award-winning poet and novelist Darnell Arnoult, the issue’s featured author, on Feb. 16 in the Woods-Penniman Building Commons at Berea.

Refreshments will be served beginning at 7:30 p.m. and the reading will start at 8 p.m. The event, co-sponsored by the Berea College Appalachian Center and the Department of English, Theatre and Speech Communication, is free and all are invited to attend.

Darnell Arnoult decided in high school that she wanted to be a writer, but didn’t become a published author until age 49, with her first book of poems “What Travels With Us.” Winner of the 2005 Weatherford Award from the Appalachian Studies Association and Berea College, “What Travels With Us” was also chosen Poetry Book of the Year by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance. Arnoult’s first novel “Sufficient Grace,” debuted in June 2006.

Born in Martinsville, Virginia in 1955, Arnoult found herself divorced and a single parent with two children at age 25. She supported her family for the next 19 years through a series of odd jobs, from delivering newspapers, changing headings on library cards, and cleaning houses, to working as a chair-side dental assistant, a secretary in an occupational therapy unit, and a counselor to prisoners in a minimum-security facility.

She received a B.A. in American Studies with a concentration in Southern Folklore from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She served as an arts and education administrator at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, receiving her M.A. in English and Creative Writing from North Carolina State University. While in North Carolina, Arnoult published several short stories and poems and taught creative writing for the Duke Short Course Program and the Duke Writers Workshop.

In addition to teaching writing at seminars, conferences and in continuing studies programs, Arnoult also has held writing classes over the years, she says, “in a library, a cheese shop, the storage room of a bookstore, a lawyer's conference room, a bank board room, a student's living room, a court house, a student's dinning room, my own living room, a drug rehab center, and a café. In these less-than-conventional classrooms I have heard fantastic stories, true and not true, and have been privileged to read some excellent writing by folks who have always wanted to write, but who, like me, had to do some other things first.”

Arnoult lived the first 19 years of her life in the foothills of Virginia and the next 25 in North Carolina, mostly in Chapel Hill and Durham. In 2000, she married a cowboy and moved to middle Tennessee, where her husband encouraged her to ride horses and to write full time. Along with her publishing success, Arnoult also has recently become a grandmother. She and her husband now live in Brush Creek, Tennessee. For more about her, visit Arnoult’s website at www.darnellarnoult.com.

For more about “Appalachian Heritage” magazine, the Weatherford Award for Appalachian literature and the Berea College Appalachian Center, visit www.berea.edu/appalachiancenter/.