Award-Winning Author Joseph Bathanti
Shares His Latest Novel, Coventry
On UNC-TV’s North Carolina Bookwatch, Friday, August 3 at 9:30 PM

Despite promises to his pregnant wife and dead mother never to follow in the footsteps of his father, Calvin Gaddy takes a job at Coventry Prison in the North Carolina Piedmont. He soon finds himself snared in the literal prison of Coventry—and a cell of his own making. While Gaddy desperately desires to do the right thing, he finds himself seduced again and again by the power that his position on the yard affords him and the diabolical energy of the prison itself.

Calvin realizes, over the course of award-winning author Joseph Bathanti’s eagerly-awaited second novel, Coventry, that in the hellish world of prison, there is no middle ground.

In the latest episode of UNC-TV’s local literary series North Carolina Bookwatch with D.G. Martin, premiering Friday, August 3, at 9:30 PM, Bathanti shares Coventry’s two penal worlds—one of brutal reality and another of inexplicable hauntings.

“What people who write memoirs or fiction say is that they’re telling a version of their truth…we’ve all heard the stories of the crazy people who live in prisons—both inmates and guards. In this book, I wanted to tell ‘my truth’ and [in my research] the thing that struck me first when I showed up at a prison [as a young man] is that, it is not as bad as I thought,” says Bathanti.  “But that was bravado, naiveté, and I quickly found that I could not spend a chunk of my life in prison—not only as a prisoner, but also as a guard. I became interested in not only the prisoner’s lives, but also the guard’s life.  And I saw the guard’s as very much, ‘in prison’ too.”

A Pittsburgh native, Joseph Bathanti came to North Carolina in 1976 as a VISTA (domestic Peace Corps) volunteer to teach in Huntersville Prison. Since then, he has continued to teach and mentor prison inmates throughout North Carolina, and he drew upon his extensive first-hand experience to Coventry to life.

“When I came to North Carolina, I wanted to be a writer… and was trying to look outside myself for stories. One of the really advantageous things that happened to me in the prison yard, was that I was handed an extraordinary narrative simply because prison inmates live in such a dramatic setting, where extraordinary things happen by the minute with extraordinary characters—people who have committed crimes,” says Bathanti. “One of the terrific things was that I was handed this narrative; but it would take me literally the better part of 30 years, not to write the book, but to somehow refine it into a story that didn’t simply sensationalize crimes in prison but in some way was a more impressionistic or surreal life in prison. I came to look at prisons as more of a phenomenon than anything that can be described in any logical way.”

Bathanti is the author of four poetry collections and the novel, East Liberty. He has B.A. and M.A. degrees in English Literature from the University of Pittsburgh, as well as an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College. Bathanti has lectured and written extensively on prisons and the death penalty. He is the former Chair of the N.C. Writers Network Prison Project. At present he is Professor of Creative Writing, and Co-Director of the Visiting Writers Series, at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC and lives with his family in Vilas, NC.

Don’t miss DG Martin’s all-new interview with Joseph Bathanti on North Carolina Bookwatch, Friday, August 3, at 9:30 PM, with an encore episode airing Sunday, August 5, at 5 PM, only on UNC-TV!

During the 20-week, 10th anniversary season of North Carolina Bookwatch, guests also include: J. Peder Zane (The Top Ten), Gov. Michael Easley (Look Out, College, Here I Come!), Michele Bowen (Holy Ghost Corner), Neal Thompson (Driving With the Devil), Joanna Catherine Scott (The Road from Chapel Hill), James Dodson (Beautiful Madness), Dan Heath (Made to Stick), Margaret Maron (Hard Row), James Peacock (Grounded Globalism: How the U.S. South Embraces the World), Tim Madigan (I’m Proud of You), Melton McLaurin (The Marines of Montford Point), Kathryn Stripling Byer (Coming to Rest), David Guy (Jake Fades),  Georgann Eubanks (Literary Trails of the North Carolina Mountains), Zelda Lockhart (Cold Running Creek), Mike Lassiter (Our Vanishing Americana: A North Carolina Portrait), Joe and Terry Graedon (Best Choices from the People’s Pharmacy), Fred Hobson (Off the Rim), and William Powell (Encyclopedia of North Carolina).

For additional information about series guests and airdates, plus links to the Bookwatch blog and online book club, please visit: www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch.

Funding for North Carolina Bookwatch is provided by UNC-TV members and by Quail Ridge Books and Music, Raleigh’s independent, full service bookstore, bringing readers and writers together since 1984.

North Carolina Bookwatch is part of UNC-TV’s ongoing commitment to produce programs for and about North Carolina. UNC-TV is the statewide 11-station broadcast network of the University of North Carolina. For more information, please visit www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch.

For more information about North Carolina Bookwatch and UNC-TV’s other original productions, please visit our website at www.unctv.org.