Ayana Mathis was stunned when Oprah Winfrey called recently to say that she had selected Mathis’s debut work of fiction, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, as her next book club selection. Mathis’s well-crafted first novel tells the story of Hattie Shepherd, a teenager who leaves Georgia in 1923 and heads north to Philadelphia in search of a better life. Hattie and her lazy, … [Read more...]
Sommers debuts promising new cabaret act at Colony
Most of the featured acts at the Colony Hotel’s Royal Room are fixtures of the New York cabaret scene. While West Palm Beach’s Avery Sommers has made some inroads in that world, she is better-known for her musical theater work, on Broadway and across the country on tour. So it is understandable that her latest act, a one-hour set that opened Friday evening and continues at … [Read more...]