Marjorie Hudson grew up in Washington, D.C., and northern Illinois and now lives in Chatham County, North Carolina. Her writing has won many honors, including two Pushcart Special Mentions for fiction, and she was a finalist in 2002 for the Sherwood Anderson Foundation award. In 2005, she was Artist-in-Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California.
Hudson’s essays and reviews have been published in North Carolina Literary Review, National Parks, American Land Forum, and many other publications.
She lives on a family farm with her husband, Sam, and various goats and dogs. Searching for Virginia Dare is her first book.
In 1587 America’s first English child was born in a remote island wilderness. Her name was Virginia Dare. Soon after her birth, Virginia and more than a hundred men, women, and children disappeared, leaving a cryptic message carved on a tree.
What became of that infant girl and her people, now known as the Lost Colony? In search of an answer, Marjorie Hudson wanders the back roads of North Carolina and Virginia in an aging Dodge Caravan with a satchel of research notes and a head full of memory and imagining. Amazed by abandoned farmhouses wrapped in kudzu, the Great Dismal Swamp “dripping with spotted snakes,” the bones of the Jamestown colony, and the living nation of the Lumbee, Hudson discovers an epic story more complex and more deeply moving than she ever imagined.
Weaving research and interview, memory and imagination, Hudson’s tale is a spellbinding journey, an invitation to deep mysteries that lurk in the history of America and in ourselves.
“An absorbing, intelligent consideration of national and personal identity, beautifully written.” ~ Lee Smith
“A fantastic weave of wit and observation, of careful investigation and scrutiny of sources, mingled with a personal narrative of a Yankee come South. . . .” ~ The People’s Civic Record
“Hudson has invented a new genre, a sort of parting of the authorial curtain to reveal . . . the commonalities that bind both author and reader to someone of another place and time” ~ Chapel Hill Herald
“[Hudson] set off on the cold trail [of Virginia Dare] like a determined bloodhound . . . and stirred up the ghosts of our first settlers, four centuries old.” ~ Durham Herald-Sun
“Hudson’s writing is so strong, so immediate, you feel as if you’re right there in the passenger seat . . .”
~ Southern Pines Pilot
“Hudson has written the book that I would have liked to have written. … What is the lens that ultimately shapes Hudson’s story? It is the importance of loss, as much as of success, to the human experience.”
~ Dr. E. Thomson Shields, Director, Roanoke Colonies Research Office, in North Carolina Literary Review
