Lance is a writer, speaker, and businessman in the greater North Carolina Triad area, and the co-founder of The Richmond Observer, a daily local news publication in the Sandhills region.
He studied history at Chowan University and performed as a member of the community chorus, where he was inspired to include Mozart's Requiem as a central theme in his upcoming novel "A New Requiem."
The creation of Dwight Kerry, one of the main characters in the novel, was inspired by his real-life vocal instructor, Dwight Berry, a former choir director and teacher in Roanoke Rapids, NC who passed away from lung cancer in 2018. Dwight and Lance became friends and colleagues while working together and performing at multiple venues in northeastern North Carolina - Dwight as a pianist and Lance as a solo baritone.
In 2017, Lance informed Dwight he would be writing a novel that would feature him as the inspiration for one of the book's central characters and plans to dedicate the work to his memory and to the cause of equality and understanding.
In "A New Requiem," Dwight Kerry, a longtime teacher and choir director in the fictional town of Freeden, is an openly gay man living in the rural South. On the night of his spring community chorus concert, Mozart's Requiem, he is arrested and wrongly accused of murdering and raping a 17-year old boy, the son of a prominent family in the community.
The radically-fundamental populous immediately turns against Dwight and convicts him in the court of public opinion, and local homegrown trial attorney, choir member, and friend Ben Bailey elects to defend him from a corrupt local justice system. Led by local pastor and religious leader Dr. Daniel Henson, Freeden's majority wages a social war against Dwight, Ben, and progressive thought, claiming that Dwight must be found guilty for the sake of Freeden's future and the moral values its townspeople hold dear.
"A New Requiem" addresses the prejudices often directed toward things different from social norms, with the subject in this story being a gay man, and calls for readers to reconsider their own preconceived ideas and become more understanding of things different from what they are used to.
