Novelist John Vercher in Conversation with Chet’la Sebree

The Writer’s Center welcomes John Vercher for a discussion of his acclaimed new novel, Devil Is Fine, in conversation with poet, essayist, and TWC board member Chet’la Sebree.
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John Vercher lives in the Philadelphia region with his wife and two sons. He has a Bachelor’s in English from the University of Pittsburgh and an MFA in Creative Writing from the Mountainview Master of Fine Arts program. John serves as an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of English & Philosophy at Drexel University and was the inaugural Wilma Dykeman writer-in-residence at the University of North Carolina, Asheville. His debut novel, Three-Fifths, was named one of the best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune and Booklist. It was nominated for the Edgar and Strand Magazine Critics’ Awards for Best First Novel. His second novel, After the Lights Go Out, called “shrewd and explosive” by The New York Times, was named a Best Book of Summer 2022 by BookRiot and Publishers Weekly, and named a Booklist Editor’s Choice Best Book of 2022.
Chet’la Sebree is the author of Field Study (FSG Originals, June 2021), winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. She is also the author of Mistress, selected by Cathy Park Hong as the winner of the 2018 New Issues Poetry Prize and nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work-Poetry (2020). She is currently working on her debut essay collection about her relationship to home, heritage, and belonging through domestic and international travel; it’s forthcoming from The Dial Press in 2025. She is an assistant professor of English at George Washington University.
About the Book
From acclaimed novelist John Vercher, a profoundly moving novel of what it means to be a father, a son, a writer, and a biracial American fighting to reconcile the past
Reeling from the sudden death of his teenage son, our narrator receives a letter from an attorney: he has just inherited a plot of land from his estranged grandfather. He travels to a beach town several hours south of his home with the intention of immediately selling the land. But upon inspection, what lies beneath the dirt is much more than he can process in the throes of grief. As a biracial Black man struggling with the many facets of his identity, he’s now the owner of a former plantation passed down by the men on his white mother’s side of the family.
Vercher deftly blurs the lines between real and imagined, past and present, tragedy and humor, and fathers and sons in this story of discovery―and a fight for reclamation―of a painful past. With the wit of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout and the nuance of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, Devil Is Fine is a darkly funny and brilliantly crafted dissection of the legacies we leave behind and those we inherit.