Fuss, fight, and cutting the huckley-buck—Dear Malindy, Underground, must I always return to the country of the dead, To the coons catting about in the trees, the North Carolina pines Chattering about sweetening bodies in their green whirring? Do these letters predict my
jump to
states
North Carolina
The current state poet laureate of North Carolina is Shelby Stephenson, who was appointed in 2015. Stephenson is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently Family Matters: Homage to July, the Slave Girl (Bellday Books, 2008). He has received a North Carolina Award for Literature and was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2015. Stephenson served as professor of English at UNC-Pembroke from 1978 to 2010 and currently runs writing workships in assisted living communities.
recent & featured listings
| type |
name |
state |
|---|---|---|
| Conference | Writers' Week Symposium | North Carolina |
| Literary Organization | Winston-Salem Writers | North Carolina |
| Writing Program | Warren Wilson College | North Carolina |
| Small Press | Wake Forest University Press | North Carolina |
| Small Press | University of North Carolina Press | North Carolina |
| Writing Program | The University of North Carolina, Wilmington | North Carolina |
| Writing Program | The University of North Carolina, Greensboro | North Carolina |
| Writing Program | The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill | North Carolina |
| Poetry-Friendly Bookstore | The Regulator Bookshop | North Carolina |
| Literary Magazine | The Pedestal Magazine | North Carolina |
poems
poem
2013
poem
2016
for Carl & Lillian Sandburg’s Connemara, Flat Rock, NC
As a child I was taken
to visit Connemara
as I remember
a little display of concrete poems
in the shapes of shoes
next to a typewriter
on an orange crate
let me know
I was
poem
1999
In the moon-fade and the sun’s puppy breath,
in the crow’s plummeting cry,
in my broken foot and arthritic joints,
memory calls me
to the earth’s opening, the graves dug, again, and again
I, always I am left
to turn away
into a bat’s wing-brush of air
