HOMER HICKAM

An Evening with Homer Hickam

Feb 3 at 7:30pm · Mountainlair Ballroom

West Virginia native and former NASA engineer Homer Hickam is a master storyteller in the tradition of the people of the Appalachian mountains. He was catapulted into fame in 1998 by his number-one New York Times bestselling memoir Rocket Boys, which was adapted into the critically acclaimed movie October Sky. Rocket Boys has since become a classic, studied in hundreds of schools and colleges across the country as an important literary work and translated into eight languages.

Hickam was born and raised in the small town of Coalwood, West Virginia. He graduated from Big Creek High School and continued on to the Virginia Polytechnic Institute where he graduated with a bachelor of science in industrial engineering. A U.S. Army veteran, Hickam served as a first lieutenant in the Fourth Infantry Division in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968, where he won the Army Commendation and Bronze Star medals. He served six years on active duty, leaving the service with the rank of captain and was employed as an engineer for the U.S. Army Missile Command.

He began his career with NASA at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, as an aerospace engineer. His specialties included training astronauts on science payloads and extravehicular activities. He trained astronaut crews for many Spacelab and Space Shuttle missions, including the Hubble Space Telescope deployment mission, the first two Hubble repair missions, Spacelab-J (the first training of Japanese astronauts), and the Solar Max repair mission.

A writer all of his adult life, Hickam has been published extensively in many magazines. He is the author of Torpedo Junction, a military history bestseller. His novel Back to the Moon is a techno-thriller. In We Are Not Afraid, Hickam tells gentle, humorous stories of people in his hometown to illustrate how they overcame fear and lived productive lives even when they faced death daily in the coal mines. He writes of the four lessons that can help anyone defeat fear, find purpose in life, and see possibilities rather than obstacles. Hickam's messages of hope and triumph over adversity are especially timely today.

Taken from the pages of Hickam's autobiography, the film October Sky won the adulation of critics and the hearts of moviegoers. Hickam's inspirational and compelling memoir focuses on growing up in the hard-working town of Coalwood. He and his boyhood friends, with the help of their parents and other townspeople, build and launch sophisticated rockets, coming to embody the town's tensions and dreams. Following the release of the movie, Rocket Boys was re-released in paperback as October Sky. The New York Times selected Rocket Boys as one of its "Great Books of 1998."

In 2003, Hickam released The Keeper's Son, which critics called a "dynamic and exciting tale," "a page-turning story of loss, courage, and providence." His most recent release, The Ambassador's Son, the highly-anticipated sequel to The Keeper's Son, is an exciting World War II adventure story set in the South Pacific. The Wall Street Journal said, "With Mr. Hickam promising two more books in the series, it looks as if we're going to have a new epic worthy of Homer."