Christopher Hebert, author of  the acclaimed novel,"The Boiling Season" (Harper Collins, 2012), will speak at the Thursday, March 1 meeting of the Knoxville Writers' Guild.

The event, which will be open to the public, will begin at 7 p.m. at the Laurel Theater, at the corner of Laurel Avenue and 16th Streets (in Fort Sanders). A $2 donation is requested at the door. The building is handicapped accessible. Additional parking is available at Redeemer Church of Knoxville, 1642 Highland Ave.

"The Boiling Season," available in March, is about a young man from the slums of a turbulent Caribbean island who becomes caretaker of an estate near the capital as a way to escape political turmoil and poverty. As the island nation plunges into war, he must choose between protecting the utopia he has created or the people he left behind.

"Writing the book required immersing myself in a place and a society very different from my own. And it also required the delicate task of creating a narrator who was native to the place," Hebert said.

"As a writer, I had to grapple with bringing to life a place, and place is very important in the book, that I didn't know intimately. And in writing the story I had to avoid the exoticizing that so often surfaces when people write about cultures foreign to their own."

 "The Boiling Season" is Hebert's first novel. He graduated from Antioch College, where he also worked at the "Antioch Review." He has spent time in Guatemala and taught in Mexico, and he worked as a research assistant to the author Susan Cheever. He earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, and was awarded its prestigious Hopwood Award for fiction. He teaches at the University of Tennessee, and lives in Knoxville with his son and his wife, the novelist Margaret Lazarus Dean.

For more information about Hebert, please visit www.christopherhebert.com. Additional information about the Knoxville Writers' Guild can be found at www.knoxvillewritersguild.org.