The Crossing at Hollar Mill to host book launch and album release celebration

Press Release

From The Reynolds Group, Inc.:

The Crossing at Hollar Mill Hosts February 27 Book Launch and Album Release
Celebration with Adrian Rice and Yes the Raven

WHAT: The Crossing at Hollar Mill welcomes Hickory’s favorite Irishmen for a joint book launch and album release celebration. Adrian Rice entertains with readings from his new book The Clock Flower and Yes the Raven, also known as Alyn Mearns, serenades with songs from his new album Love is Covered in Dust.

WHERE: The Crossing at Hollar Mill
883 Highland Ave SE, Hickory, NC 28602

WHEN: February 27, 2014
8 p.m.

TICKETS: Free Admission

ABOUT THE CROSSING AT HOLLAR MILL
The Crossing’s full service rental space includes over 10,000 square feet accommodating 350 seated guests and 600 guests at full capacity for future concerts and large scale events. Features of the innovative event space include a spacious 720 square-foot stage with state-of-the-art audio as well as a catering kitchen, beverage service and custom dance floor. In addition to the main space, the Crossing also features two meeting rooms, The Hollar Room and the Lavitt Room, both named in tribute to the building’s rich history. These break out rooms offer ample space for business presentations and intimate group luncheons.

ABOUT ADRIAN RICE
Born just north of Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1958, Adrian Rice graduated from the University of Ulster with a BA in English & Politics and an MPhil in Anglo-Irish Literature. He has delivered writing workshops, readings, and lectures throughout the United Kingdom, Ireland and America and published multiple high-acclaimed books. His first sequence of poems appeared 1990 in Muck Island, a collaboration with leading Irish artist, Ross Wilson, and copies of this limited edition box-set are housed in the collections of The Tate Gallery, The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and The Lamont Library at Harvard University. He has edited five anthologies of children’s poetry, and in 1997, Rice received the Sir James Kilfedder Memorial Bursary for Emerging Artists. In autumn 1999, as recipient of the US/Ireland Exchange Bursary, he was Poet-in-Residence at Lenoir-Rhynne University, which first brought him to Hickory, NC, where he received ‘The Key to the City.’ His first full poetry collection, The Mason’s Tongue was published that same year and shortlisted for the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Literary Prize, nominated for the Irish Times Prize for Poetry, and translated into Hungarian by Dr. Thomas Kabdebo. His poems and reviews have been broadcast internationally on radio and television and have been published in several international magazines and journals, including Poetry Ireland Review and The New Orleans Review. Rice returned to Lenoir-Rhyne University as Visiting Writer-in-Residence for 2005 and since then, he and his wife Molly and their son Micah have settled in Hickory. Rice currently teaches English and Creative Writing at Catawba Valley Community College. Turning poetry into lyrics, he has also teamed up with Hickory-based and fellow Belfastman, musician/songwriter Alan Mearns, to form The Belfast Boys, a dynamic Irish Traditional Music duo.

ABOUT YES THE RAVEN
Yes The Raven (also known as Alyn Mearns) possesses a singular sound that’s difficult to describe yet impossible to forget. Mearns was born and raised in the troubled streets of Belfast, Northern Ireland, the second son of an itinerant preacher. His teenage years were spent inside a guitar, absorbing every musical style within earshot. Eventually, his skill would land him in America on a music scholarship. After several band incarnations, downplaying his playing for a more minimal, post-punk aesthetic, he found himself alone again with his guitar. He explains, “I found myself falling in love with the guitar again, not in the traditional ‘lead guitarist’ sense, but in a way that could accompany my songs and provide a satisfying emotional landscape. My guitar became a kind of miniature band, a miniature cathedral.” This music is not merely a sum of its parts though. His body seems to have grown a guitar and his guitar seems to be inhabited by a voice, a haunted ship on the sea of song. The lyrics are truly lyre-ic, forming out of the melody, which in turn is birthed from plucked harmony. Audiences are left spell-bound by something that seems to have absorbed modern pop and folk music, but is, at its heart much more ancient, something Orphean, Homeric, Davidian.