NEWBERRY — On Tuesday, September 5, the Hal Kohn Memorial Library will be hosting Books and Bites, an event led by author Susan Zurenda to discuss her new book, “The Girl From the Red Rose Motel.”
“The genesis for ‘The Girl from the Red Rose Motel’ came out of my experiences at Spartanburg High School where I taught four classes of 12 grade AP English and a fifth class called Reading Strategies,” Zurenda said. “My day consisted of polar opposites: extremely bright and typically privileged AP students working to get ahead with college credit earned in high school versus nearly illiterate teenagers, most from deprived backgrounds, trying to read well enough to pass the exit exam to graduate.”
Based off of those experiences, “The Girl From the Red Rose Motel” follows two students from different economic backgrounds who form a relationship and a teachers role in helping them through the complications that come with it.
“The wide disparity among my students and my desire to succeed in teaching both extremes was the inspiration for creating the characters of Sterling Lovell and Hazel Smalls, students from opposite socioeconomic backgrounds who meet when they are sent to in-school suspension and form an unlikely relationship,” said Zurenda.
Zurenda, a Spartanburg native, has won a number of awards for her first book, “Bells for Eli,” including the Gold Medal in the 2021 IPPY Awards for Best First Book – Fiction and the 2020 Foreword Indie Best Book Awards. She said her newest book will appeal to readers of love stories, coming of age novels and literary teacher stories.
The event will start at noon and is a free community event open to the public.