The Hub City Writers Project and Spartanburg High School will host a celebration of the life and work of novelist and political cartoonist Doug Marlette at the Showroom, 149 S Daniel Morgan Ave., downtown Spartanburg, Wednesday, Aug. 22 at 7:30 p.m. Marlette, author of The Bridge and Magic Time, died in a traffic accident July 10. The Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist was scheduled to be in Spartanburg this month as part of the SHS Summer Reading Program. Syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker and novelist Janis Owens will be joined at The Showroom by Alex Conner, rising senior at SHS, in a panel discussion of Marlette's most recent book, Magic Time.

Magic Time is a thrilling story of race, history and shame in Civil Rights-era Mississippi. The public is invited and this event is free.

Kathleen Parker is a member of the Washington Post Writers Group, and her twice-weekly column appears in some 350 newspapers nationwide. Her writings in support of American troops, first-responders and other front-line participants in the war on terror were among the reasons The Week magazine named her as one of the country's top five columnists in 2004 and 2005. She is writer in residence at the Buckley School of Public Speaking in Camden.