February 27, 2023

Amarillo’s community reading program, AMARILLO READS, returns in March with a focus on books by award-winning author and former Texas Panhandle resident, David Wright Faladé.

David Wright Faladé is the author of three books: the narrative history Fire on the Beach: Recovering the Lost Story of Richard Etheridge and the Pea Island Lifesavers, the young adult novel Away Running, and most recently, Black Cloud Rising.

Fire on the Beach was a New Yorker notable selection and a St. Louis-Dispatch Best Book of 2001. 

Away Running was named an Outstanding International Book by the US Board on Books for Young People and was selected by the Junior Library Guild and the Texas Library Association for its high school reading lists.  

Set during the American Civil War, Black Cloud Rising is a novelization of the life of Richard Etheridge and the African Brigade, a regiment comprised of freed slaves who campaigned against Confederate hold-outs in coastal North Carolina during the Civil War.  With powerful depictions of the bonds formed between fighting men and heartrending scenes of sacrifice and courage, Black Cloud Rising offers a compelling and nuanced portrait of enslaved men and women crossing the threshold to freedom.
 
Faladé is a professor of English at the University of Illinois and a 2021-2022 Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library.  He spent part of his childhood in Amarillo before moving to Borger where he played football at Borger High School.  

An Evening with David Wright Faladé will take place on Thursday, March 9 at 7 PM at the Downtown Amarillo Public Library.