Photo: Chi Brown, NCCU
ALUMNI NEWS
A Novel Request
Kyle Serba ’91 Plays a Role in John Grisham’s Latest Bestseller Back in October 2020, when Kyle Serba ’91 received an email from “John Grisham,” he assumed the sender just happened to share a name with the famous novelist. The message was a request: Could Serba—senior associate athletics director for strategic communications at North Carolina Central University—give Grisham a tour of campus the next day? Grisham was in the process of writing a novel, he explained; a fictional story about a young basketball player from Africa who attends North Carolina Central on scholarship to escape his home in war-torn South Sudan. The tour would help inform the story and ensure that the details about NCCU were correct. Serba realized there was no coincidence: The message was, indeed, from the author known for bestselling legal
thrillers The Pelican Brief, The Client, and A Time to Kill, among many others. Grisham wanted Serba’s help in understanding both NC Central’s campus and culture— everything from residence hall nicknames to the basketball program’s place in students’ social lives. Serba, who has been in his current role since 1994, was certainly up to the task. The position at NC Central is “the first full-time job I’ve ever had,” he says, laughing. After graduating from Utica College in 1991 and a brief stint as the sports information director at the University of Albany, Serba has spent his entire professional career at the historically black university in Durham, North Carolina. The job isn’t a far cry from the career Serba imagined 38
