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By Michelle Hines, University Relations
Fred Chappell.
Posted 9-15-08
GREENSBORO — UNCG will celebrate Greensboro’s Bicentennial Sunday, Oct. 12, with music and poetry.
The celebration begins at 3:30 p.m. in the School of Music Recital Hall.
The Center for Creative Writing in the Arts has commissioned former North Carolina Poet Laureate Fred Chappell, who helped establish the university’s MFA Writing Program, to write a poem in honor of the Bicentennial. Eddie Bass, emeritus professor of music, set Chappell’s poem to music. Students and faculty from the School of Music will perform the piece, which is structured around four of the city’s public parks.
Attendees will also enjoy readings by two alums of the MFA Writing Program, Sarah Lindsay and Carole Boston Weatherford.
The program, co-sponsored by the MFA Writing Program, is free and open to the public. Free parking will be available in the McIver Street deck.
Chappell taught for 40 years in the MFA Writing Program. Author of 17 books of verse, two volumes of stories, two of criticism and eight novels, he has been awarded the Sir Walter Raleigh Prize, the Thomas Wolfe Prize, the Best Foreign Book Prize from the Academie Francaise, the North Carolina Medal in Literature and an Award in Literature from the National Academy of Arts and Letters. For his poetry, he has been awarded the Bollingen Prize and the Aiken Taylor Prize. He served as Poet Laureate of North Carolina from 1997-2002.
Bass was chair of the Composition/History/Theory division of the School of Music until 1992. From 1992 until his retirement in 2003, he served as coordinator of composition. His “Pas de Quatre” for trombone quartet was awarded first prize in the 1989 composition contest of the International Trombone Association. Bass has received numerous commissions, most recently from the Bel Canto Ensemble for “Appalachian Echoes.” From 1968 to 1985 he was principal trumpet of the Greensboro Symphony, and until 2000 a member of the Market Street Brass. He has published articles on the music of Debussy, Berlioz and Mahler.
Weatherford has written 32 books, including “Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom,” winner of an NAACP Image Award, Caldecott Honor Medal and Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration. Other titles have won the Jefferson Cup, Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award and Carter G. Woodson Award from National Council for the Social Studies. Her latest release is the fictional verse memoir, “Becoming Billie Holiday.” Winner of the Ragan-Rubin Award from the North Carolina English Teachers Association and a two-time North Carolina Arts Council Writers Fellow, Weatherford teaches at Fayetteville State University.
Sarah Lindsay is the author of “Primate Behavior,” a 1997 National Book Award finalist, “Mount Clutter” and “Twigs and Knucklebones.” Her work has appeared in Atlantic Monthly, The Georgia Review, The International Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Parnassus and Poetry.
For more information, contact Mark Smith-Soto in the Center for Creative Writing in the Arts at (336) 334-3775 or mismiths@uncg.edu.