Award-winning author Gabriel Bump to give reading at CCU
Bump is author of the novels The New Naturals (2023) and Everywhere You Don’t Belong (2020), which was named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2020, an Electric Lit Favorite Novel of 2020, and winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Bump is assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The event, titled “Belonging through Books: Reading/Writing/Communicating Across Boundaries,” is grant-funded through CCU’s Quality Engagement Plan (QEP), a five-year initiative titled Belong@Coastal: Building Student Achievement through Inclusive Engagement. The reading is the culminating event of a semester-long initiative in which students read and studied Bump’s Everywhere You Don’t Belong as part of their Introduction to Creative Writing class. Five sections of the English 201 course, about 100 students, participated in the initiative. Prior to the reading, students will meet with Bump for a question/answer session, which students have prepared for in their classes.
Jason Ockert, grant writer and professor of creative writing in the Department of English, said students’ long-term engagement with the work is essential to the experience.
“The book has been on the syllabus, and we’re having conversations about it as well as about the responsibilities of literary citizenship,” said Ockert. “I wanted to pick a book that students would be engaged by and could relate to, so Everywhere You Don’t Belong was a perfect choice.”
Bump’s 2020 novel is a coming-of-age story, told in short vignettes, of a young man named Claude McKay Love growing up in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago in the 1990s. The work balances humor and social commentary as it explores questions of identity and the pressures of finding one’s place in society.
“This is a great opportunity for students to interact with an award-winning author,” said Ockert. “They’ll be able to recognize how an author isn’t just something that’s a vague idea. There’s an actual individual with whom they can communicate. That’s the whole idea of Belonging through Books. Books help build awareness of the self and others’ identities, experiences, and perspectives. That’s what we’re trying to do: allow for our students to recognize where they are as readers, writers, and participants in a vast, diverse culture. That’s the goal.”
For more information on Belonging Through Books or Bump’s reading, contact Ockert at jockert@coastal.edu or 843-349-2531.