Dean King, an award-winning and best-selling author whose nonfiction books include a recent account of the Hatfield-McCoy feud, will speak Thursday, March 27, at 7 p.m. in Longwood University’s Wygal Auditorium.

The event, free and open to the public, will include a book signing at 8 p.m. by the historian, adventurer and journalist from Richmond, who has chased historical and maritime adventure stories across several continents, often retracing his characters’ footsteps.

The most recent of King’s 10 books, The Feud: The Hatfields & McCoys, The True Story, was published in May 2013 to critical acclaim. USA Today gave it “4 Stars,” and the Wall Street Journal called it “popular history as it ought to be written.” King, whose magazine stories have appeared in Granta, Garden & Gun and Outside magazine, among others, was the producer of the History Channel reality documentary series “Hatfields & McCoys: White Lightning,” which evolved from his research. He has been the chief storyteller on two History Channel documentaries.

King also is the author of the national bestseller Skeletons on the Zahara, about 12 shipwrecked American sailors’ hellish journey across the Sahara Desert in 1815, and Unbound: A True Story of War, Love, and Survival, about the women who embarked on Mao Zedong’s Long March in 1934. For the former, King trekked more than 100 miles across Western Sahara on foot and by camel. For the latter, he hiked through treacherous highland bogs and over Dagushan Mountain, the most deadly part of the Long March, in ethnically Tibetan Western Sichuan Province.

King is the fourth speaker in the Longwood Leadership Forum, which began in January. The series highlights outstanding examples of leadership in the arts, education, literature, sciences, technology and philanthropy. For more information, call 434-395-2003 or visit www.longwood.edu/leadershipforum.

This is presented in partnership with the Friends of the Janet D. Greenwood Library.