*The Wake Forest Farmers Market will be open from 10 a.m. to noon – winter hours – this Saturday, January 7, in the employee parking lot along South Taylor Street behind Wake Forest Town Hall.
Local farmers and artisans will have meats, seasonal vegetables, bread, baked good and other local wares for sale. See the market’s Facebook page for information about the vendors and sign up for a weekly notice about the offerings that Saturday. Remember the Wake Forest Farmers Market is unusual in that it is owned by the farmers who sell their wares there.
*Tri-Area Ministry Food Pantry at 149 East Holding Avenue is open from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. every second and third Saturday and every Monday and Wednesday for food pickup. It serves more than 800 families in Wake Forest, Youngsville, Rolesville and their surrounding areas. Call 919-556-7144 for information about receiving food, volunteering and donations. You can send donations to Tri-Area at PO Box 1394, Wake Forest NC 27588.
*Wake Forest’s Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration will be held Thursday, January 19, beginning at 6 p.m. at Friendship Chapel Baptist Church on Friendship Chapel Road.
*The Wake Forest Historical Association will hold its annual meeting , Sunday, January 22, beginning at 3 p.m. in the Wake Forest Historical Museum on North Main Street.
*Debut novelist Jeffrey Dale Lofton will at Page 158 Books for a book reading and signing on Saturday, February 25, 2023. His book is generating a lot of buzz, having won American Book Fest’s Best Book Award for LGBTQ+ Fiction and the Seven Hills Literary Prize for Fiction before its official publication date of January 10, 2023/available in hardcover, audiobook, and digital editions. His novel, Red Clay Susie, is a coming-of-age story of a gay, physically misshapen boy struggling to figure out life and love in a conservative family and community in the Deep South, specifically rural Georgia. It is inspired by events in the author’s own life; Jeffrey is gay and has a skeletal birth defect (half of his chest is concave constricting his heart and half of his lung capacity) and was bullied, body-shamed, and ill-treated by schoolmates and members of his own extended family. Advance praise for Red Clay Suzie from such authors as Christopher Castellani (“arresting debut”), Alice Powers (“Read Red Clau Suzie and cheer on Philbet, a new literary hero.”), W. Ralph Eubanks (“An intimate exploration of people, place, and identity, Red Clay Suzie opens up the idea of the South into one that is more inclusive and real.”), and James Hart (“From a new, pitch-perfect, Southern voice, a story so close to the heart you can almost hear it beating.”) among others, has been lavish. The novel contains a foreword by Lindy Woodhead, author of War Paint, which became a Broadway musical, and adapted for the PBS series Selfridge.
