Join us for a reading Tuesday, June 25rd at 6:30pm with journalist, author, and univerity professor Tom Graves for his new book White Boy: A Memoir.

About the Book

White Boy is one man’s unvarnished story of love, loss, race, Memphis, and a dark past. Everything is laid bare when Memphis author, journalist, and university professor Tom Graves takes a vivid and deeply introspective account of his life. Certainly no one can accuse Graves of looking back through rose-colored glasses as chapter after riveting chapter he confronts his family’s racist past, shares his eye-witness memories of the integration of Memphis public schools, details his dating escapades with women from another race, and brings you to tears with his powerful account of the roller-coaster relationship with a Sierra Leone native whom he met on Match.com and brought to the U.S. to become his bride. This courageous and unforgettable memoir is sure to stir—and perhaps even prompt you to reconsider—your own feelings about love and race.

“Tom Graves asks the hard questions of himself and he digs deep for the difficult answers. He faces his racist raising, traces his evolving response and investigates, particularly, how he has expressed that response in the female company he’s sought...Whatever your race or gender, White Boy will have you contemplating your own past, rethinking what you’ve done. And can do.”

                — Robert Gordon, author of It Came From Memphis and Memphis Rent Party

About the Author

Tom Graves was born in Memphis and attended Bethel Grove grammar school and graduated from Sheffield High School.  He earned a B.A. in Journalism from Memphis State University and in his mid-forties earned an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Memphis.  He has published six books including the award-winning Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson which has been published in four languages.  He was Consulting Producer and Writer for the Emmy-winning documentary film Best of Enemies about the acrimonious 1968 debates between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr., a subject that had fascinated him as a freshman college student.  He is a tenured English professor at LeMoyne-Owen College in Memphis, a historically black college founded after the Civil War.  He is the owner of Devault-Graves Books, an independent publishing company.