UKIAH, Calif. – Thursday, Oct. 18, at 7 p.m. marks the opening of the Friends of the Mendocino College fall reading series with a reading and talk by author Waights Taylor Jr.

His book, “Our Southern Home,” was awarded the 2012 Independent Publisher Silver Medal for Best Book in the Southeast Non-Fiction category in New York City this past summer.

One reviewer has likened Taylor’s writing to “Faulkner’s sociological and moral discontinuity and the author’s southern voice by cadence and phrasing reminding me of Shelby Foote and his cousin Horton.”

This nonfiction work deals with three 18-year-old southerners who start the day of March 25, 1931, not knowing that the events soon to occur in Scottsboro, Alabama, will lead them and the South on an inexorable journey of change: Clarence Norris is boarding a freight train as a hobo in Chattanooga; Waights Taylor Sr. is a student at the University of Alabama; Rosa McCauley Parks is a resident of Pine Level, Alabama.

The three become involved in the Scottsboro events in different ways with profound implications to the region and their lives.

Waights Taylor Jr., born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, currently lives in Santa Rosa, Calif.

His professional career included 24 years in the aviation industry and then 22 years in management consulting.

When his professional career was coming to an end, he turned to writing. He is an author, a poet, and a playwright.

His second book, “Our Southern Home: Scottsboro to Montgomery to Birmingham – The Transformation of the South in the Twentieth Century,” was published in October 2011.

This reading will be conducted as an “In conversation” type of appearance where questions by Mendocino College Head Librarian John Koetzner will be responded to by Waights Taylor Jr. which will elicit readings from different sections of his book.

The event will take place in Room 4210 in the new library building at the Mendocino College Ukiah campus, and it is sponsored by the Friends of the Mendocino College Library, an affiliate group of the Mendocino College Foundation. For more information, call 707-468-3051 or visit www.mendocino.edu .