Tuesday, February 21 at 7 pm
Church of the Holy Cross – Daniel Island
THE CIGAR FACTORY – Guest Speaker,
Michele Moore, Author
The Daniel Island Historical Society invites you to hear author Michele Moore talk about her exceptional new novel, The Cigar Factory. This novel is set in storied Charleston at the time when fishermen of the Mosquito Fleet rowed miles offshore for their daily catch and street vendors sold she-crab and porgy.
Moore tells the story of two entwined families, both devout Catholics–the Irish-American McGonegals and the African-American Ravenels forging friendships through struggle. With evocative dialect and remarkable prose, Moore pulls back the curtain on the often overlooked history of working class Charleston in the early 20th century. The Cigar Factory celebrates the poetry of the Gullah–Geechee language and the birth of “We Shall Overcome” as a song of protest and promise during the 1945 Tobacco Workers Strike.
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“Speaks true-mouth. Transcendent. Courageous.” Pat Conroy
“Strikes gold. High-quality historical fiction.” Kirkus
Michele Moore grew up in Atlanta, but her father had been raised in Charleston by his great aunt who worked at the Cigar Factory. Moore says it was this family history that eventually drew her to the Cigar Factory where black and white women worked in the same factory but were kept segregated–that would become a primary theme of her novel: Strong women overcoming racial divisions.
Michele’s creative nonfiction has been broadcast on Georgia Public Radio and published in the Louisville Review, Habersham Review, ACM (Another Chicago Magazine), Groundwater, and O, Georgia. To see a recent SCETV interview with Michele and members of the cast who performed her script, Sounds of the Cigar Factory at the 2016 Piccolo Spoleto Festival, please visit: