Murray State Reading Series welcomes author Jeremy B. Jones

 

MURRAY, Ky. — The Murray State Reading Series, sponsored by the Department of English and Philosophy, will welcome author Jeremy B. Jones on Thursday, April 23 at 7:30 p.m. in Faculty Hall room 208 on Murray State’s campus. The reading is free and open to the public.

Jones is the author of the nonfiction book Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor’s Scandalous Secret Diaries (Blair, 2025) as well as the memoir Bearwallow: A Personal History of a Mountain Homeland (Blair, 2014). Bearwallow was named the 2014 Appalachian Book of the Year in nonfiction and was awarded gold in the 2015 Independent Publisher Book Awards in memoir. His essays have been published in Oxford American, Garden and Gun, The Bitter Southerner and Brevity, among others. He also writes frequently for Our State Magazine. Jones earned his Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa and is a professor of English studies at Western Carolina University, in his native North Carolina. He also serves as the series co-editor for In Place: a literary nonfiction book series from WVU Press.

In Jones’ most recent work, Cipher, readers are introduced to a lost ancestor’s coded diaries. In 1975, a man stumbled upon a box of hand-sewn notebooks in a house set for demolition in Wadesboro, North Carolina. After thumbing through the delicate pages and finding them written in code, he passed the books to a retired National Security Agency cryptanalyst who deciphered them, uncovering the recorded life of a white Southern farmer named William Thomas Prestwood. The diaries offered a ground-level view of a 19th-century man who passed his days recording eclipses and dissecting rabbits and calculating planetary orbits and reading Goethe and sneaking into barn lofts and closets with dozens of lovers. 

“The reader is left,” the codebreaker wrote, “with the lasting impression that here in these pathetic little books is the very essence of Everyman’s life from the cradle to the grave.”

But to author Jeremy Jones, this strange farmer was no Everyman. He was his great-great-great-great grandfather.

Cipher reanimates Prestwood, warts and all, following the author’s ancestor as he courts women and hides runaway slaves, as he fathers children with his wife and with an enslaved woman, as he mines for gold and befriends Daniel Boone’s great nephew, and as he rubs shoulders with a young Zebulon Vance and raises sons soon to die on the fields of Gettysburg. With research, Jones fills in the blank spaces of this Everyman’s life. Along the way, Jones begins tracking his own life alongside the fascinating arc of this long-ago forefather, forging an intimate relationship with a man whose own account, in Jones’s expert hand, begins to take on texture, drama, emotional resonance—even as the author uncovers curious and disturbing details about his ancestor. And thus, about his family, and about himself.

Books will be available for purchase, and a book-signing will follow the event.  Questions about the event should be directed to Creative Writing Program Coordinator Dr. Gwendolyn Paradice at gparadice@murraystate.edu or email the Department of English and Philosophy at msu.english@murraystate.edu.