The nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center at 905 Port Republic St. will host a free public reading by five writers at 5 p.m. on First Friday, March 6.

Wine and light refreshments will be served, and books will be available for sale and signing.

The participating writers are in Beaufort to also serve as faculty members for the Conroy Center’s Writers Retreat Weekend at the Anchorage 1770 Inn on Saturday and Sunday, March 7 and 8.

Participating in the First Friday Reading are three winners of the prestigious Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction: novelists Mindy Friddle (Secret Keepers), Bren McClain (One Good Mama Bone), and Tiffany Quay Tyson (The Past Is Never); along with poet, novelist, editor, and teacher William Walsh (Fly Fishing in Times Square) and novelist and author consultant Stephanie Austin Edwards (What We Set in Motion).

<b>About the authors</b>

Before <b>Stephanie Austin Edwards</b>&nbsp;(above) returned to the Lowcountry of South Carolina, and to her love of writing, she had a 22-year career in New York theater, film, and television. She now writes fiction and non-fiction, facilitates writers groups, teaches writing workshops, and consults with authors. Her debut novel, What We Set in Motion, won a Best Submission Award at the Atlanta Writer’s Club Conference. She is also a contributing writer to Our Prince of Scribes: Writers Remember Pat Conroy.

<b>Mindy Friddle</b> is the author of The Garden Angel, selected for Barnes &amp; Noble's Discover Great New Writers program. Her second novel, Secret Keepers, won the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction. Her recent short stories have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Southern Humanities Review, Steel Toe Review, and Phoebe. The South Carolina Arts Commission granted Mindy a Fellowship in Prose, and she has twice won the South Carolina Fiction Prize. Named a Walter E. Dakin Fellow in Fiction at the Sewanee Writers' Conference, Mindy has been awarded residencies at Ragdale and Bread Loaf.

<b>Bren McClain’s</b> critically acclaimed debut novel, One Good Mama Bone from Pat Conroy’s Story River Books, won the 2017 Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction and the 2018 Patricia Winn Award for Southern Literature. It was also named Pulpwood Queen 2017 Book of the Year, a 2017 Great Group Reads by the Women’s National Book Association, a Southeastern Independent Booksellers Association (SIBA) Okra pick, longlisted for SIBA’s Southern Book Prize and a finalist for the 2018 Crook’s Corner Prize. The novel was recently published in France and retitled Mama Red. She is also a contributing essayist to the award-winning anthology Our Prince of Scribes: Writers Remember Pat Conroy.

<b>Tiffany Quay Tyson </b>is the author of two novels. Her most recent, The Past Is Never, received numerous awards including the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, and the Mississippi Author Award for Adult Fiction from the Mississippi Library Association. Her debut novel, Three Rivers, was described by novelist John Dufresne as, “heartfelt, redemptive, sometimes harrowing, and irresistible.” She serves on the faculty of Lighthouse Writers Workshop and the Lighthouse Young Writers Program in Denver, Colo.

<b>William Walsh</b> is the author of four books of poetry, four novels, three film screenplays, a collection of interviews, an anthology of contemporary American poetry, and a collection of essays. He is the director of the Etowah Valley MFA Program at Reinhardt University in Waleska, Ga., where he teaches graduate and undergraduate creative writing and literature. Among his awards for his writing, he has received the 2018 ĆerveŃa Barva Press Editors Book Series Award, Georgia Author of the Year, and his work has been recognized by the Association of American University Presses as a Selection for Public and Secondary Libraries. He is also a contributing writer to Our Prince of Scribes.