27 VIEWS of RALEIGH: The City of Oaks in Prose & Poetry features the work of twenty-seven (plus two) Raleighites who create a literary montage of North Carolina's capital city in fiction, essays, and poetry.

Novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, and even a science fiction writer capture the city in a variety of genres—spanning neighborhoods, generations, cultural and racial experiences, historic eras—reflecting the social, historic, and creative fabric of Raleigh.

As Wilton Barnhardt writes in the book's introduction, "We seem to have flourished not because we have solved all the problems of the New South, despite leading the way now and again, but because we the citizens of Raleigh decided to be erudite, cultured, enriched, and entertained . . ."