Tim McLaurin is a native of Cumberland County, North Carolina, and a former Marine and Peace Corps volunteer who once was known as Wild Man Mac, proprietor of a traveling snake show, a stint that provided material for his novel, The Last Great Snake Show (1997). He is also the author of three additional novels--Cured by Fire (1997), Woodrow's Trumpet (1993), and The Acorn Plan (1989), about which James Dickey said, "McLaurin gives us the raw world of a southern mill town and a young man's passage through pity and terror to manhood. His is an extraordinary talent." In addition, McLaurin has crafted two memoirs, Keeper of the Moon: A Southern Boyhood (1998), a work in which, as Robb Forman Dew noted in The New York Times Book Review, "it is quite wonderful to encounter Mr. McLaurin's eloquence and an elegance of language," and, most recently, The River Less Run (2000), for which his writing was again praised, by Pat Conroy: "McLaurin's prose flows like a stream over bright pebbles and reminds other writers how beautiful an English sentence can be when crafted by the best of us." McLaurin currently lives in Hillsborough, N.C., and teaches at N.C. State University. Handouts are available for McLaurin's short stories, as are chapters from his memoirs and novels. Please contact Jim Bowers if you are interested in reading a bit of his work, or wish to share such materials with your classes.