Charlotte Readers Podcast: Miriam Herin and Christy Hallberg

In today’s episode, we meet authors Miriam Herin and Christy Alexander Hallberg, who came to Charlotte for a North Carolina Literary Review reading event at Park Road Books.

This episode includes their stories about Cambodian refugees and mercy, Christy’s story about Freedie Mercury, the star of the rock group Queen, and readings from Miriam’s award-winning book, A Stone For Bread, about a collection of poems allegedly saved from a Nazi death camp.

We open the show with two readings, the first from Miriam’s award-winning short story, Lucky, which was inspired by her work in Charlotte for an inner-city program for teenaged children of Southeast Asian refugee families. We follow with Christy’s story, Fistful of Mercy.

Miriam Herin has been a social worker, taught composition and literature at two universities and three colleges and been on the editorial staffs of Good Housekeeping Magazine and the Winston-Salem Journal.

Miriam’s first novel, Absolution,won the 2007 Novello Press Literary Award and was cited by Publishers’ Weekly as an “impressive” debut. Her second novel, A Stone for Bread, was nominated for North Carolina’s prestigious 2016 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction and International Book Awards named it a Finalist in their Literary Fiction category for 2016.

Christy Alexander Hallberg’s works have appeared in such journals as Main Street Rag, North Carolina Literary Review, Fiction Southeast, Riggwelter, Eclectica, Solidago, STORGY Magazine, and Concho River Review.

Christy is a Teaching Associate Professor of English at East Carolina University and received her MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. In addition to her teaching duties, she is Senior Assistant Editor forNorth Carolina Literary Review.