2025-11-30
30 分钟Hello and welcome to Meet the Writers, I'm Georgina Godwin.
We're at the Charleston Literary Festival,
a gathering that seems to draw the whole city into conversation with its past and its future.
Charleston is one of those rare places where history isn't something you visit,
it's something you live inside.
The stories are in the bricks, in the porches, in the sea light,
and in the people who dedicate their lives to saving them from silence.
My guest today is one of those people.
Born here in the 1950s to parents who arrived after surviving the Holocaust,
he grew up in a Charleston that was both beautiful and shadowed,
cosmopolitan and insular, a city full of hidden lives and untold stories.
And over the decades as an archivist, historian and novelist,
he's done more than almost anyone to uncover those layers.
The Jewish story, the queer story, the artistic story,
the Charleston renaissance and the quiet revolutions that shaped the low country.
His novels have become part of the city's literary undercurrent.
His non-fiction has redefined how we understand Charleston's cultural identity.
And now, his latest book, Porgy's Ghost, restores Dorothy Heywood to the legacy she helped create,
a legacy that still draws people from around the world to this city.
And it's a privilege to meet him here in the place that shaped him.