By Michelle Hines, University Relations
Contact: (336) 334-5371
Posted 2-16-07
GREENSBORO, NC – UNCG will host the Spring 2007 Southeastern Literary Magazine and Small Press Festival March 8 and 9.
The festival is sponsored by The Center for Creative Writing in the Arts at UNCG, The MFA Writing Program at UNCG, The Greensboro Review, Backwards City Review, The University Libraries at UNCG, Poetry GSO, the Greensboro Public Library, the North Carolina Arts Council, Spring Garden Press and the Writers’ Group of the Triad.
It will include a keynote reading by poets Fred Chappell and Kathryn Stripling Byer, a book fair, panel discussions, readings, signings, workshops for aspiring writers and editors and master classes in fiction and poetry.
For schedule information about the festival, go to http://www.uncg.edu/eng/mfa/festival , or contact Terry Kennedy at (336) 334-5459 or terry_kennedy@uncg.edu.
Event venues will include Elliott University Center, Jackson Library, Tate Street Coffee and the UNCG Faculty Center.
The keynote reading will bring the festival to a close. It begins at 7 p.m. Friday, March 9, in the EUC Auditorium, and a reception and book signing will follow. A $5 donation is suggested to help support the festival.
Fred Chappell is the former North Carolina Poet Laureate whom writer Lee Smith calls “our resident genius, our shining light.” Born in Canton, Chappell has published about 30 books of poetry, fiction and critical commentary. He has won dozens of prizes, including the Sir Walter Raleigh Prize, the Best Foreign Book Prize from the Academie Francaise, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry from Yale University, the Appalachian Writers Lifetime Achievement Award and the Southeastern Booksellers Association Prize for best novel and best poetry. He has won the Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Award eight times.
In 1994, he was awarded the Order of the Long Leaf Pine, a prestigious state honor that recognizes North Carolinians for their outstanding public service. Chappell is retired after 40 years as a professor in the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at UNCG. In 1986, he received the O. Max Gardner Award, the highest faculty honor bestowed by the University of North Carolina system. His latest books of poetry are “Backsass” and “Companion Volume,” and his latest novel is “Look Back All the Green Valley.”
Kathryn Stripling Byer, North Carolina’s current poet laureate, grew up in southwest Georgia, graduated from Wesleyan College in Macon, Ga., and earned her Master of Fine Arts in Creative writing from UNCG, where she studied with Allen Tate, Fred Chappell and Robert Watson. Her books of poetry include “Catching Light”; “Black Shawl”; “Wildwood Flower,” which was the 1992 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets; and “The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest,” which was published in the Associated Writing Programs award series.
Byer’s poems have appeared in Arts Journal, Carolina Quarterly, Georgia Review, Hudson Review, Iowa Review, Nimrod, Poetry and Southern Review, as well as numerous anthologies. Her essays have appeared in “Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers,” “Dream Garden: The Poetic Vision of Fred Chappell,” The Boston Globe, and Shenandoah. Byer has received writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. She is poet-in-residence at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee.
Other writers who will take part in the festival include Greensboro poet Sarah Lindsay; Dr. Mark Smith-Soto, poet, playwright and editor of The International Poetry Review; Jim Clark and Terry Kennedy, editors of The Greensboro Review; and Gerry Canavan, editor of Backwards City Review.
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