Jeremy B. Jones in Conversation with Ashleigh Bryant Phillips

Join us for a night with Jeremy B. Jones, the author of Cipher: Discovering My Ancestor's Scandalous Secret Diaries, who will be in conversation with Hub City Press author Ashleigh Bryant Phillips.

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About the Book

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 NSA 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. About himself.

About the Author

Jeremy B. Jones is the author of the forthcoming 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 (IPPY) 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. Jeremy earned his MFA 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.

About the Conversation Partner

Ashleigh Bryant Phillips is a writer from Woodland, North Carolina. She was the runner-up in the Little Miss Watermelon Contest of 1995 in Murfreesboro, NC. She’s a graduate of Meredith College. While there she interned for Grayson Haver Currin at INDY Week, covering the Triangle’s music scene. Ashleigh earned an MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she was mentored by Rebecca Lee, Wendy Brenner, and Clyde Edgerton.

Her debut short story collection, Sleepovers, is the winner of the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize, selected by Lauren Groff. It was published by Hub City Press in 2020. Stories from it appear in the Paris Review and the Oxford American. Sleepovers was translated into Italian by Michele Martino and published as Pijiama Party by Bompiani in 2023. In 2024, Sleepovers won the Towson Prize for Literature.