text:
A Life Time in Reverse: What's on Your Bucket List? by Chuck Werle
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform$9.00, paperbackISBN: 978-1-508835752September, 2015MemoirAvailable from www.Amazon.com
The online book is divided into two major sections: Mine and Yours. The first evolves from cruising through the author's experience over six decades to the second, where readers learn how to form their own lifelong Bucket Lists from seventy suggestions that could have affected their lives.
The 13,000-word mini-book features thirty-eight episodes or chapters, often including lessons to be learned.
The episodes and events are divided into five sections to expedite the process: personal, humor, adventure/travel, careers, and sports/hobbies.
Chuck Werle wears many hats. In the past two years. Chuck has concentrated on helping other authors by editing their manuscripts and promoting finished products. He also managed to write his second book. In 2009, he authored his first book, From Tee to Green in the Carolina Mountains. It was published by iUniverse in Bloomington, Indiana, and is available on Amazon and from your local bookstore. During that period, he was a golf columnist for the Laurel of Asheville magazine, until 2010.
He is also principal of Carolina Image Builders, a public relations counseling firm with a national reputation in media relations and crisis communications.
Werle retired to Asheville from Chicago in 2000 after he was chosen the Outstanding Public Relations Executive by both Chicago chapters of the Public Relations Society of America.
A native of Lapeer, Michigan, he earned a BA degree in Journalism from Michigan State University and advanced degrees from the University of Illinois—Chicago and San Jose University Institute. He began his public relations career with Miller Brewing Company after four years as a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal.
Hats Off! to Brenda Kay Ledford whose story "Angels Over Iraq" appeared in the anthology The Best Angel Stories 2016 (Guideposts Books and Inspirational Media).
Hats Off! to Russell W. Johnson, winner of the Robert L. Fish Memorial Award, presented at the Edgar Awards for best short story by a new author. The winning story, "Chung Ling Soo's Greatest Trick," was one he'd submitted to the North Carolina Writers' Network Critiquing and Editing Service and received excellent feedback from Ruth Moose.
Hats Off! to Chuck and Heidi Thurston who have signed on with Indigo Sea Press (formerly Second Wind Publishing): Chuck for Senior Scribbles Unearthed and Senior Scribbles Second Dose; Heidi forThe Duchess, the Knight and the Leprechaun.
Hats Off! to Terry Himes who won second place in the Charlotte Writers' Club Nonfiction Contest with "Betty and Bernice," a tale of Terry's two mothers. Terry will receive $75 and a certificate at the February CWC meeting. The judge was Dannye Romine Powell, the Books columnist for the Charlotte Observer and author of three poetry collections and a work of nonfiction.
The Haunting of William Gray by Renee Canter Johnson
The Wild Rose Press, Inc.$16.99, paperback / $5.99, e-bookISBN: 9781509204366November, 2015Fiction: RomanceAvailable from www.Amazon.com
Can Madeline Waters capture a picture of the ghost William Gray believes is haunting him? Others have caught some shadowy figures on film at the Antebellum house, built in the eighteen hundreds on a privately-owned island, in Winyah Bay, South Carolina.
A single photo would result in William granting permission for her to use the private journals of his long-dead ancestor and namesake, Captain William Gray, in her thesis research.
Madeline's disbelief in the supernatural isn't helpful and she wonders if the wealthy loner is suffering a mental collapse until she experiences the ghost of the Captain herself. Saving her from drowning, he floods her with the emotions she has longed for, and opens a dimension for her previously thought to be pure fantasy.
Is it possible to fall in love with an apparition, or will she be able to aid in setting his spirit free? With help from a local Gullah woman's knowledge of voodoo, the mystery unravels. In the process, William and Madeline's hearts also become entwined.
Renee Canter Johnson was born in North Carolina, where she still resides. She has studied in France, Italy, and has been awarded two terms at Noepe Center for Literary Arts on Martha's Vineyard.
Hats Off! to Philip Gerard whose debut album, American Anthem, will launch in February. Gerard's music looks "both outward toward our history and culture for inspiration and inward toward our deepest loves." American Anthem is a textured musical quilt of the American experience, from hobos and cowboys to more personal songs of touring the open road and finding love under an Arizona moon, featuring flat-picked and finger-style guitar, fiddle, keyboards, and multiple harmonies.
Waiting on Unknown Roads by Sara Claytor
Main Street Rag$14.00, paperbackISBN: 978-1-59948-538-6November, 2015PoetryAvailable from the publisher
"In this stunning collection, Sara Claytor perfectly captures the archetype of the Wise Crone—not to be confused with any sort of pathetic figure, but a human being at the pinnacle of her earthly power—a woman who dances on her own grave because she hasn't wasted a moment of her life. Embracing love, loss, joy, and sorrow with equal ferocity, these poems have much to teach us if we take the time to 'listen'."—Terri Kirby Erickson, author of A Lake of Light and Clouds
"Sara Claytor was born on the wild side of words. She has taken her life and spun her worlds into clear-eyed amazement on the page. And given it to us wrapped in gold and tied in silver. What joy! What tears! What magic! Nothing worthy has, or ever will, escape Claytor's bright quickness."—Ruth Moose, author of Doing It at the Dixie Dew
"Whether writing about lost loved ones, magical childhood places, a bag lady, the various faces of God, or one's own slow demise, Sara Claytor connects us to other human beings, and gracefully does so. With roads into the past where wounds 'still glimmer…/like broken glass,' some poems are heartbreaking. All journeys are uncertain and Claytor keeps us reading to discover what waits around the bend. This is an engaging book."—Peter Makuck, author of Long Lens (New & Selected Poems)
Gladys Knows Her Fate
No one cares about an old naked woman on the beach, her legs, stiff as if spray-starched, spread like a wishbone. She eats Roquefort cheese and peaches, juice lacquering her breasts in luminous blotches. No one cares that her tits look like melted taffy, her wisps of pubic hair like prickly grass. She licks her fingers, flicks a peach pit into the ocean's edge.
No matter the sun, the glare, the wind whipping her hair into gray spaghetti strings. No matter gasps, giggles from passers-by shuffling sand. Unconcerned. Proud. Expectant. She waits for her last lover, Neptune, to rise from the sea, erase her blotchy-veined skin, grant her iridescent mermaid fins, hand her a lobster cell phone so she can dial God.
A native Tar Heel and former teacher of literature, writing, and speech/drama communications, Sara holds two graduate degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Recipient of numerous poetry prizes, short stories have received first place in Sensations Magazine competition; at the Virginia Highlands Festival, and The Charlotte Writers' Club. Poems and fiction have appeared in over 130 publications including a short story reprinted as one of twelve top stories of the last five years in The Pisgah Review. She has worked as a fiction editor for a small press and as co-editor of the former internet journal The Moonwort Review. Her published books include: Reviving the Damsel Fish, Memory Bones, Carrboro Poetica, and Howling on Red Dirt Roads which was one of two books recognized by the Poetry Council of North Carolina for the year 2008. For the seventh year, she coordinates the North Carolina Poetry Society Reading Series at McIntyre's Fine Books near Chapel Hill, which brings in poets from across the state for monthly readings.
Hats Off! to Sharon C. Williams, author of the new children's chapter book Jasper: Amazon Friends and Family (October, 2015), who was interviewed by Lorna Suzuki in All Kinds of Writing.
Hats Off! to David R. Tanis whose story "Christmas, 1963, Fort Sill, Oklahoma" appears in O-Dark-Thirty.
Night Rumbles by Nancy Janes
Rockrose Press$12.99, paperback / $1.99, e-book / $17.95, audiobookISBN: 978-0-692314074 March, 2015Fiction: Sci-Fi / Fantasy / ChristianAvailable from your local bookstore or www.Amazon.com
"This book is awe-inspiring and a true pleasure to read. It is a wondrous fantasy tale that sent me on a lovely journey. It had an almost a calming feeling within me as I read it."—MagicWanda review 2015
Brad, a being of light, left a paradise to enter a world of tyranny. Why?
On the planet Lydo, in the city of Iru, nineteen-year-old Brad, a research student at the Science Academy, enters Daganland, a Netherworld city, to research its little-known inhabitants. The caveat: he will lose his memory and take on the form of the natives.
Waking up in the town of Nofer in Daganland, Brad enters into a world ruled by a Tyrant. It is a planet of darkness where the inhabitants live and work by night. The majority of the inhabitants are former humans. Brad is assigned to cross over to the human world to observe their habits and behaviors as a part of his future career. Instead of obeying his instructors to be merely an observer he grows fond of the humans, and his studies take a new direction.
Using sharp insight interlaced with dashes of wit and satire, Nancy Janes weaves a twisting tale that creates a candid portrait of humanity and its idiosyncrasies from the vantage point of a pure outsider battling forces he doesn't quite fully grasp.
Nancy Janes (Zelman) is a former clinical social worker who now writes full-time. She has written two books: The Boy Who Walked a Way and and Night Rumbles, loosely based upon upon each other.
Fantasy/Sci-FI, short stories in the Americana vein, and poetry are her interests. Her writings are Christian-based, but the secular reader will find in them the universal themes of human struggles and the search to master life's troubles.
Helloooo Vietnam: 364 Days and a Wake-Up by Colonel Tom Davis
Old Mountain Press$3.99, e-bookASIN: B00MSVVIZUAugust, 2014MemoirAvailable from www.Amazon.com
This e-book is the second chapter of the Tom Davis' memoir: The Most Fun I Ever Had With My Clothes On: A March from Private to Colonel. In his memoir, the author relates his experiences during the thirty-one years spent in the US Army, rising through the ranks from private to full colonel. Twenty of those years he served with US Army Special Forces (Green Berets).
This book chronicles his time in three combat zones: Vietnam, Bosnia, and Iraq/Turkey. Included are his experiences commanding Special Forces Operational A Detachments which specialized in Underwater Operations, High Altitude Low Opening Parachuting, Mountaineering, and Small Atomic Demolitions Munitions as well as two Special Forces Battalions and a Joint Special Operations Task Force.
Each chapter covers his duties and responsibilities at the Army Installation where he served. Sometimes funny. Sometimes sad. Always interesting.
Col (Ret) Thomas (Tom) Hoyt Davis, III (AKA The Squid), holds a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Georgia and a master's degree from the University of Southern California. Tom entered the Army as a private and retired as a full colonel. He spent twenty of his thirty-plus years in the Army serving with Special Forces (Green Berets) on four continents and in ten foreign countries. He has worn a Green Beret at every rank from 2LT to Colonel and commanded at every level from Special Forces A Teams to a Joint Special Operations Task Force. The various A Teams he commanded specialized in Mountaineering, Underwater Operations, High Altitude Low Opening (HALO) parachute techniques, and Small Atomic Demolitions Munitions (SADM). In addition to the Army's Command and General Staff College and Army War College, he has attended Airborne, Ranger, Special Forces, Underwater Operations (UWO), Danish Combat Swimmer, Special Forces Surface Swimmer Infiltration Technique Course, High Altitude Low Opening (HALO) parachute school, Small Atomic Demolitions Munitions (SADM) and others.
His short stories, articles, and poetry have been published in Poets Forum, The Carolina Runner, Triathlon Today, ByLine, Georgia Athlete, The Saturday Extra (magazine section of the Fayetteville Observer), A Loving Voice Vol. I and II, and Special Warfare (a professional military journal published by the Special Warfare Center). Many of his short stories have received honors in writing contests sponsored by ByLine magazine. Other books by Tom include The Life and Times of Rip Jackson, The Patrol Order, Growing up In Vienna, Georgia, and an action adventure novel, The R-complex. He has recently published his memoir: The Most Fun I Ever Had With My Cloths On: A March from Private to Colonel.
Hats Off! to NCWN board member Alice Osborn whose new poetry collection, Heroes without Capes, was reviewed by CL Bledsoe in Pedestal Magazine. "Underlying Osborn's humor is a sense of grounding in working-class culture. Her references are more likely to come from pop culture than Greek tragedies, though she's got a few of those as well...[her poems balance] the sacred and profane, the lewd and the clean."
Hats Off! to Joan Leotta whose feature on former North Carolina poet laureate and activist Joseph Bathanti appears in Ambassador Magazine, the publication of the National Italian American Foundation.
Hats Off! to Alli Marshall of Asheville whose short story "Structural Soul" won the 2016 Shrewd Writer flash fiction contest. Her story was chosen because of its "intriguing characters, bizarre subject matter, and compelling content."
Hats Off! to Lisa Hosokawa Garber, Faith Holsaert, and Elizabeth Zertuche, whose work appears in the newest issue of Firefly Ridge Literary Magazine.
Thinking about the Next Big Bang in the Galaxy at the Edge of Town by Scott Owens
Main Street Rag$14.00, paperbackISBN: 978-1-59948-548-5December, 2015PoetryAvailable from the publisher
"A symphony of musical memory and lyrical philosophies, Thinking About the Next Big Bang in the Galaxy at the Edge of Town triumphs—from 'All the Meaningful Noise' to 'Persona' and on to 'Used,' the last sound-poem. Owens invents possums and God, plus himself at various ages, until the impractical art of love becomes the way to give meaning to the racket of surround, longing 'for the kindness we could do for each other.'"—Shelby Stephenson, North Carolina Poet Laureate
"In this new book of poems, Scott Owens revisits many of the themes we have come to expect from him, often in the mode of the confessional, endlessly awakening the reader's senses with a whole gallery of deep images. However, there is more, for this is the furthest Owens has descended into the well of contemplation, and in doing so, he proves here to be a poet that doesn't just write to document, but one that must write to be alive."—Tim Peeler, author of Checking Out and Waiting for Charlie Brown
Having seen the transformation of one rundown furniture plant into expensive restaurant, brewery, boutique shops for clothes and frozen yogurt, and noticing the ongoing cleaning out of another, and knowing it had already happened with my life, education and divorce and writing redeeming what had once been worthless, I couldn't help but wonder how much could be achieved with any body nearly worn out, teeth straightened with invisalign, eyes fixed by laser, gut restored with probiotics, foot pain eliminated by the Strassburg Sock,
but then even after rejuvenation, even among the young, it's not always pretty, not always full of grace, the crude, oil-stained nuts and bolts of life, the unphotogenic face, a bad day that keeps getting worse, walls that don't line up, some bricks uneven, some not quite the right size, and that's what the mortar's for, the gray areas of tolerance, forgiveness, understanding, empathetic appreciation of things being left imperfect, only as good as we can stand to make them be.
Originally from Greenwood, SC, Scott Owens holds degrees from Ohio University, UNC Charlotte, and UNC Greensboro. He currently lives in Hickory, where he teaches at Lenoir Rhyne University, edits Wild Goose Poetry Review, owns and operates Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse and Gallery and coordinates Poetry Hickory. Thinking About the Next Big Bang in the Galaxy at the Edge of Town is his thirteenth collection of poetry. His work has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, the Next Generation/Indie Lit Awards, the North Carolina Writers Network, the NC Poetry Society, and the Poetry Society of SC. He has been featured on The Writer's Almanac four times, and his articles about poetry have been featured in Poet's Market twice.
The Complete Tryon Diary by Susan McNabb
CreateSpace$12.99, paperback / $3.99, e-bookISBN: 978-1512044393June, 2015Nonfiction: HumorAvailable from www.Amazon.com
Fall in love with Tryon, North Carolina, in this complete collection of Susan McNabb's insightful and often funny weekly newspaper columns from the Tryon Daily Bulletin as she discovers the unexpected in small-town life after nearly three decades in Hollywood. Included are all 50 columns, capturing a year in the "friendliest town in the South" with thoughts on Tryon native Nina Simone, the Mule Club, rented goats, and trashion shows.
Susan McNabb is the author of The Complete Tryon Diary, a collection of columns from the Tryon Daily Bulletin, "The World's Smallest Daily Newspaper," in which she chronicles her adjustment to small-town life in North Carolina after nearly three decades in Los Angeles. Tryon Diary: Tales from the Friendliest Town in the South is a collection of her 2014 columns.
Susan grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, and received an English Literature degree from the University of Tennessee before moving to L.A. to pursue modeling and commercial acting. Now settled in Tryon with her husband and rescued dogs, Susan is also an accomplished potter and fiber artist. You can visit Susan at www.susanmcnabb.com or on Facebook, Goodreads, or Twitter.
Hats Off! to Kathie Collins whose piece "Before Reading" won an Honorable Mention in the 2016 Ruth Moose Flash Fiction Contest, sponsored by the Charlotte Writers' Club.
Hats Off! to Joan Leotta whose poem "Three Crows and a Storm" is forthcoming in Gnarled Oak.
Hats Off! to Maren O. Mitchell whose poem "Raymond Duvall, Sleeper" appears in the January, 2016, issue of the English online poetry journal, The Lake.
Hats Off! to Brenda Kay Ledford whose essay "Five Brothers in the Civil War," co-written with Barbara Ledford Wright, was published on the North Carolina Civil War Center website.
A Love We Deserve (True Love Book 2) by Betsy Anne
CreateSpace$12.95, paperback / $2,99, e-bookISBN: 978-1-508732471March, 2015Fiction: RomanceAvailable from your local bookstore or www.Amazon.com
In this sequel to Mine, Not Hers (Book 1 in the True Love series), we find funny Georgia girl Melanie at her breaking point.
Melanie's husband Chris has come home for the last time smelling of a cheap mistress. She's finally had enough. She kicks him to the curb once and for all, but now what?
Bearing witness to the love her best friend Katie shares with her husband Jason, has opened her eyes to see that she deserves more than what she's settled for. Problem is, where to begin? How does she meet someone when she's so jaded and distrustful of men?
After fumbled attempts with bars, dating websites, and personal trainers, she's had enough. Swearing off men altogether, she throws all of her energy into making her life better, and working for a cause she believes in. When she least expects it, she meets a handsome, muscular stranger whose enraptured by her. Even though she's drawn to him by an intense attraction, she pushes him away, knowing that Mr. Perfect will be next in her line of failed relationships.
Is he strong enough to break down the brick wall she's built around her heart or will he protect his own which hides deep secrets from his past?
A page turner from the beginning, Melanie's sad, funny, steamy, and sweet story will envelope the reader until the very last page.
Betsy Anne is a happily married, hopeless romantic with three children. Her first novel Mine, Not Hers, was completed in April 2014 and published digitally and in paperback on Amazon.com. Betsy Anne holds a BS degree in Sociology from The University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She and her New Jersey-born husband Henry love hanging out with their children and families, traveling, their secondary children (two cats and a dog), and spending time at their beach house in South Carolina. She is currently writing her third novel.
Hats Off! to Tina Barr whose poem "Agricultural Fair" is featured on the website of The Gettysburg Review.
Keepsakes by Shawndra Russell
Shawndra Russell Communications$4.99, e-bookASIN: B00QPQIO3SFebruary, 2015Fiction: Women'sAvailable for pre-order from www.Amazon.com and from the publisher
Chapter 1
"You're moving to ITALY? And you want a DIVORCE?" "Yes," she said quietly. "What about 'til death do us part?" he yelled. "Didn't that mean anything to you?" "Of course it did. But this means more." "How can it mean more than us?" "Because it does." "I don't understand Bridgette. When did this happen?" "I applied for this artist's residency on a whim about six months ago and was notified I'd won a spot a couple months after that." "So you've known for four months and didn't tell me?" "I'm sorry, Gabe. I thought this would be easier." At that moment, he heard a car horn. What else could he say? She had her bags packed, her one-way flight booked, and her mind set. She was going to Italy to look at masterpieces, paint masterpieces, be surrounded by greatness. Apparently, she didn't think Gabe was all that great anymore. Apparently, she thought he was holding her back from her true potential. Apparently, she was a cold, heartless bitch.
Keepsakes begins with a divorce bomb when Bridgette tells Gabe she's leaving him and moving to Italy moments before her cab pulls up to whisk her away. In the aftermath, Gabe and his group of friends living in Charleston, South Carolina, navigate through the pain and confusion together. Gabe turns to the keepsakes of he and Bridgette's relationship to remember the good times and figure out what's next. Should he fight for his marriage, or begin the next chapter of his life?
Shawndra Russell is an author, digital marketer, and freelance writer who has contributed to Forbes Travel Guide, Society South, Travel+Leisure, BeerAdvocate, Media Bistro, Snooth, and Business in Savannah, among others. Her novels include Couple Friends and Keepsakes, and she has published three social media resources titled 51 Ways to Help Your Social Media Manager Crush It!, Start Today: DIY Social Media for Small Businesses, and Start Today: Social Employee Advocacy Program.
Russell splits time between her adopted cities of Asheville, North Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia, and lives with her husband and first-look editor Gary and their Boston terrier, Massy. Her free time is spent trying craft beers, traveling whenever possible (so far hitting China, most of Europe, Canada, Mexico, Dominican Republic, and thirty of the states including Hawaii and Alaska), and of course, reading some of her favorite authors like Nora Ephron, Emily Giffin, Veronica Roth, and Candace Bushnell.
"I like to explore milestones in people's lives with my fiction," Russell explains. "Love, friendship, divorce, careers, death...these are the topics that affect us all, and through my novels I aim to take readers through the ups and downs of life."
She loves Twitter and sharing her favorite quotes from books mid-read at @ShawndraRussell. You can read some of her other published work and blog at www.shawndrarussell.com.
She's also an alum of Ashland University where she played college volleyball and earned her BA in English before heading on to become a Thundering Herd at Marshall University, earning her MA as the Graduate Assistant Coach for the volleyball team.
Hats Off! to S. Lorraine Norwood whose short story, "Hosanna, A History," appeared in the 2014 New Southerner Literary Edition, edited by Bobbi Buchanan. A reading of works in the anthology was held in Louisville, KY.
Hats Off! to Darlena Moore who was named a finalist in the 2014 Broad River Review Rash Award in Fiction for her short story, "What It All Comes Down To."
Hats Off! to Sally Stewart Mohney, winner of the Southern Poetry Breakthrough Prize: North Carolina, for her poetry collection, Low Country, High Water. The book will be released in 2016 by Texas Review Press.
Spy Doc by Catherine Yee
Whiskey Creek Press$3.99, e-bookSeptember, 2014Fiction: ThrillerAvaialble from www.Amazon.com
This is a different kind of spy story about men and women who seek to understand what makes the varied assortment of world leaders and other world notables, both good and evil, tick. They gather and assess information gleaned from endless hours of research and file gathering, to put together a profile that will provide our government the tools needed to deal with these people and their governments.
Buried in the bowels of one of the several intelligence agencies in the US government is an office of clandestine medical personnel. Their mission is to analyze the health and mental state of international persons of interest and report their findings to America's policymakers. The team is on call 24/7 to comment on and analyze any written observations, pictures or videos of such persons of interest that may come into the hands of the U.S. government. The goal is to provide timely information to policymakers and negotiators so that the United States of America may achieve maximum success in dealing with the people concerned. Usually this is done in the safe confines of the Agency walls, but sometimes the analysts are forced to place themselves in harms way. Through it all and despite the circumstances, their Code of Honor is to Do No Harm.
Catherine Yee is an Air Force, Vietnam-era veteran assigned to the Strategic Air Command Headquarters, 8th Air Force, at Westover AFB, Massachussets, in 1960. After her husband's discharge from the Air Force, they moved to his hometown of Shreveport, Louisianna. A few years following, she went to work for AT&T's telephone manufacturing plant in Shreveport where she worked for twenty-one years. In the late 1980s her husband took a promotion with Gannett News Service and they moved to Northern Virginia. There, Yee worked for a mortgage bank. Following that, she worked for the Central Intelligence Agency where sje remained for sixteen years until her retirement in 2005.
Erasing the Doubt by Mary Kendall
Finishing Line Press$14.49, paperbackFebruary, 2015PoetryAvailable from the publisher
"Mary Kendall's Erasing the Doubt is captivating from start to finish. Moments of nostalgia, memory, and wisdom rise and stir the heart with each turn of the page. The reader is summoned not only to know the author but themselves through these thoughtfully honed poems. Each page reveals the poet's understanding of her world and her reflections on life. Kendall's work aches with longing, beauty and power. She has cleverly entwined classic literature, the Greeks, and Russian modernists with the enduring beauty of prose and a dash of contemporary style, to give us a unique and personal work well worth reading."— Kelle Grace Gaddis, MFA, author of Polishing a Gem on the Surface of the Sea and editor, Brightly Press
Erasing the Doubt is Mary Kendall's first chapbook. Often described as a lyrical or meditative poet, Kendall has presented a selection of poems that offer an introspective examination of human interactions in actions and words.
The beautiful cover photograph, "Schwerelos (Weightless)," is by talented Dresden, Germany, photographer Christine Ellger, and used with her very generous permission.
Mary Kendall is a poet and a retired reading teacher who lives with her husband in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Mary has a B.A. degree in English and a M.Ed. degree in Reading and Language. She worked as a reading specialist/teacher for thirty-four years. During her many years of teaching, one of her most favorite activities was writing poetry with children.
Over the years, Mary has sporadically published poems in print and online poetry journals. In 2005, she was the grand prizewinner in a writing competition sponsored by the publication, Carolina Woman. She is also the co-author of A Giving Garden (© 2007), a children's book based on one of her poems.
Mary formally studied poetry writing in the early 1970s with poet Ruth Whitman in Cambridge, MA, and many years later, in 2004, had the fortune to take a writing workshop with poet Jane Hirshfield at the Aspen Summer Words writing program.
Hats Off! to Glenda Beall whose poem will appear in the forthcoming Southern Poetry Anthology Vol VII: North Carolina (Texas Review Press), edited by William Wright. The anthology includes four NC poet laureates, Robert Morgan, Ron Rash, Janice Moore, Nancy Simpson, Maren Mitchell, Scott Owen, and more.
Hats Off! to Gilda Morina Syverson who will celebrate the publication of her memoir, My Father's Daughter, From Rome to Sicily, at Queens University of Charlotte on Sunday, March 1, 2:00-4:00 pm. Free and open to the public!
Hats Off! to Lenard D. Moore, winner of the 2014 NC Literature Award, who was profiled recently in the Jacksonville Daily News.
Hats Off! to Heather Bell Adams whose story "Three Lies and a Truth" appears in edition #457 of Thick Jam.
Running Music by Crystal Simone Smith
Longleaf Press$10.00, paperbackISBN: 978-0-9829290-9-4December, 2014PoetryAvailable from the author
"I suppose it is not too unusual for a person to have family responsibilities, a job, and a vocation, and for that person to find it hard to keep things ongoing and mostly under control. Running Music addresses this subject with candor, sometimes rueful humor, and always with a determined attitude, 'game face,' they say these days."—Fred Chappell, North Carolina Poet Laureate, 1997-2002
"Running Music is a necklace of tales interloping rich narratives from beginning to end…endless in surprises. Crystal Simone Smith captures the miracles and horrors; the sublime found in the mundane; the haunting awareness of entanglement. These are poems shot straight from the heart… intentionally hitting or missing, sometimes both. Running Music sings with solidarity for the children, for the relentless love of life and living…a tribute and offering to the breath of the running spirit."—Jaki Shelton Green, 2014 inductee, NC Literary Hall of Fame
"The speaker in Crystal Simone Smith's collection of poems, Running Music, stays keenly observant while wrapped up in life's daily routine. She is both world-weary and hopeful, engaged and curiously amused. Here she is—coming upon a field of buttercups in the rain, poised in a pack of runners at the start of a race, nursing her son through a long night. Time and again in these sane poems, she lays out her experience, and her insights, with the resolve of an expert craftsman. In poem after poem, Smith boldly embraces the challenges life hands her, then she calmly sets them down and run swiftly into the night."—Sebastian Matthews, author of We Generous and Miracle Day
Crystal Simone Smith was raised in Prince George's County, Maryland, and educated in North Carolina at Bennett College, UNC-Greensboro, and Queens University of Charlotte. She is the author of Routes Home (Finishing Line Press). Her work has appeared in numerous journals including: Callaloo, Nimrod, Barrow Street, Obsidian II: Literature in the African Diaspora, African American Review, and Mobius: The Journal of Social Change. She is an alumnus of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and the Yale Summer Writers Conference. She holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and lives in Durham, NC, with her husband and two sons where she teaches English Composition II and Creative Writing. She is currently the Managing Editor of Backbone Press.
Hats Off! to Renea Winchester whose book on farming and cooking, Farming, Friends, and Fried Bologna Sandwiches, was reviewed in the Southern Literary Review.
The Place Where I Left You by Sandra Ann Winters
Salmon Poetry $21.00, paperback ISBN: 978-1-908836-93-9 November, 2014 Poetry Available from the publisher or www.Amazon.com
"Sandra Ann Winters' poems are refreshingly direct, heroic in their address of the issues at the heart of the human condition. A natural empathy for the 'individual journey' is leavened by a superb mastery of her chosen craft, what Joyce calls 'a scrupulous meanness.' Her experience of growing up in rural North Carolina along with her extensive travels in Ireland bring a unique dimension to a poetry that transcends geographic and socio-cultural divides. How she unpeels the masks that would distract us from an assessment of our true Selves is quite unique in modern poetry. A most welcome and timely addition to the canon of Irish poetry." —Eugene O'Connell, Editor, Cork Literary Review
"In The Place Where I Left You, Sandra Ann Winters has given us poems that disturb our comforting myths of family, place, and self—themes the book's divisions announce—as well as poems that testify to quotidian heroism in simple acts of persevering: the will to plant, to wash greens, mow hay, paint rooms, to 'hang on.' Whether in impoverished, rural North Carolina, or the high haunts of Yeats and Lady Gregory, these thematic loci are the universal landscape out of which all human individuation emerges and, sometimes, transcends.
"Winters' poems are word paintings, and, like the impressionist masters the poet emulates, her carefully wrought pictures establish life, but from a distance. The distance, as in 'The Kitchen,' separating the poet's strategic act of copying Monet's mustard-colored walls from the inanity of picking 'yellow nits' from her son's hair; or the distance in time, the decade elapsed between the planting and abandonment of an unsuccessful wisteria vine that suddenly bursts into an 'explosion' of lavender.' A distance traveled, survived, through all the ways we humans fail and, sometimes, save each other, or ourselves. Winters' palette is expunged of the rosy; her touch, hot, in pursuit of the 'mot juste.'
"The editor of Ireland's Cork Literary Review, Eugene O'Connell, calls Winters' collection a 'welcome and timely addition to the canon of Irish poetry.' The same might be said for American letters." —Janet Joyner
"Sandra Ann Winters' poems 'range from earth to stars and cut to the quick.' The impulse to confront loss with unflinching honesty is finely balanced by the impulse toward joy and dazzlement—by language, by color, by wild creatures, by sustaining relationships with others. . . These are wise poems. Whatever the loss, new life waits. Wisteria dormant for a decade blooms again. The spirit endures and 'we all hang on' ('The Wisteria Blooms')." —Becky Gould Gibson, author of Need-Fire, writes on Calving Under the Moon
"Sandra Ann Winters takes us 'one foot and two inches / above [our] line of vision' in poems reminding us to expand our own focus and be wary of what we usually overlook in the process of living our daily lives. From planting wisteria to taking a shower, looking for a dog or laying out a corpse, her words startle us with tender insights and graceful expression." —Terri Strug, author of Musical Progression in the Poetry of Randall Jarrell, writes on Calving Under the Moon
Sandra Ann Winters was winner of the 2011 Gregory O'Donoghue International Poetry Competition with her poem "Death of Alaska." The editors of the North Carolina Literary Review nominated "Water Signs" for the 2011 Pushcart Prize. Her poems have been published in the Cork Literary Review, Southword Journal, the North Carolina Literary Review, the Wisconsin Review, and others. She is author of a previous poetry chapbook, Calving Under the Moon (Finishing Line Press, 2013).
The Place Where I Left You will be formally launched in Ireland at the Cork Spring Poetry Festival February 12, 2015, and in the U.S. at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference in Minneapolis, MN, April 9-11, 2015. In approximately June, 2015, Dufour Editions (and Amazon.com) will distribute her book in the US.
Visit Sandra's new website at sandraannwinters.com.
Hats Off! to Jonathan K. Rice who has a poem forthcoming in Pirene's Fountain, a biannual online poetry journal.
Hats Off! to Allison Freeman whose flash-fiction story, "The Expectation of Another Day," appears in the January Issue of Bartleby Snopes.
Hats Off! to Joseph Mills whose poem "When Will These Three" is the TIE Poem of the Month in The Inquisitive Eater.
Hats Off! to Susan M. Steadman: a scene from her full-length play, Love Is a Seven-Letter Word, has been accepted for publication in The Best Scenes for Kids Ages 7-15, edited by Lawrence Harbison for Applause. Publication is tentatively set for December. The news is enhanced by the fact that her daughter Paige, a theatre practitioner in the Atlanta area, has had a scene accepted from one of her plays as well!
Hats Off! to Joan Leotta whose ten-minute play, "Pinpoint Wisdom," will be produced by Fort Point Theatre Channel of Boston as part of Channel/Dance: An Evening of Movement, Art, and Theater, February 13-14, 2015. Also, The Penny Dreadful accepted one of her twenty-one-word stories for its next issue.
The Second-Greatest Baseball Game Ever Played by Drew Bridges
iUniverse$24.95, hardcover / $14.95, paperbackISBN: 978-1-491747797October, 2014MemoirAvailable from your local bookstore or www.Amazon.com
A soldier coming home to build a life beyond war is one of the oldest stories ever told. From Homer's Odysseus to today's wounded warrior, there are millions of such stories. They are all unique and they all share common features. The Second-Greatest Baseball Game Ever Played is one of those stories, told in part from an American GI's World War II letters to his pregnant wife, in part through the author's memories and reflections about his solder-father, and in part through an afternoon of baseball played by ten to fifteen-year olds in western North Carolina in 1957.
The Brooklyn Dodgers defeated the New York Yankees in the seventh game of the 1955 World Series in the greatest baseball game ever played. The second-greatest baseball game ever played took place Saturday, June 29, 1957. No Yankees, Giants, Dodgers, Cardinals, or Red Sox were there. The game played out in author Drew Bridges's hometown of Hildebran in western North Carolina. Two teams of boys, ten to fifteen years old, faced off on the high school baseball diamond, no uniforms and no organized league. Bridges played second base, his brother played third, and their dad coached the team.
In this memoir, Bridges tells the story of that afternoon of baseball and how it came to be through his recollections and his father's wartime letters to his mother who was pregnant with their first child. It shares the words of an ordinary American serviceman who is dreaming about a life beyond war.
Field of Dreams meets A League of Their Own meets The Sandlot in this story of a soldier's return home from World War II and his work with others in the community to build a youth league baseball program. The Second-Greatest Baseball Game Ever Played shares the game of baseball through the eyes of a ten-year-old and shows how this game captured the heart and soul of a community and became so vital to all.
Kirkus Reviews calls the author an "entertaining writer" who presents "intriguing characters." Signed copies are available at The Storytellers Book Store in the town of Wake Forest, NC.
Drew Bridges is a (mostly) retired psychiatrist who has reclaimed his undergraduate English major identity by opening The Storytellers Book Store of Wake Forest. He lives in Wake Forest with his wife Lauren who co-owns the bookstore. He is a graduate of Gardner-Webb Jr. College, Lenoir Rhyne College, and the Medical School of UNC, Chapel Hill. He has a previous novel, Family Lost and Found, and a book about storytelling.
Hats Off! to Joseph Cavano who, although he has written only five flash fiction stories, each has been published or is forthcoming. The latest, a 500-word story titled "Tender Things," will appear in The Zodiac Review sometime in mid-March.
Fiddledeedee by Shelby Stephenson
Press 53$14.95, paperbackISBN 978-1-941209-17-2January, 2015PoetryAvailable from your local bookstore or the publisher
"Shelby Stephenson can walk out his back door—even in his sleep, it seems, so tithed to the land is his subconscious—and see what lies hidden before our very eyes: in the roods and plowsoles, the tree bark and creek beds, in his beloved spectre ancestors forever singing in his head. He writes about the mystery of the dirt—what it yields, what it reclaims—with more precision and prescience than any poet I can think of. I can hear him now, whispering his sacramental litany, his invocation: 'it is nothing but a song—the long journey home.' Fiddledeedee is Shelby at his best. Blessed be his wholly liturgical verse—the bard, the very voice, of North Carolina." —Joseph Bathanti, former Poet Laureate of North Carolina
"I am very moved by Fiddledeedee, by the accumulating strength of its forward movement as well as by telling details, of the natural and spiritual world." —A.R. Ammons, winner of the 1973 and 1993 National Book Award for Poetry
"'What can we do but sing?' Shelby Stephenson writes in Fiddledeedee. In this long poem, he has enriched and deepened the themes of previous books, among them, Middle Creek Poems, The Persimmon Tree Canal, and Poor People. We often have poems of memory that are rooted in the poet's rural upbringing in North Carolina, rustic, elegiac, comic, grim. In Fiddledeedee, memories or homage are not an end in themselves. The poet continually seeks to connect who he was with who he is—exploratory riffs that can surprise his understanding—and therefore ours. The result is a compelling poem of meditative complexity that at the same time is poignant, lyrical, and philosophical." —Merrill Leffler, author of Mark the Music
"'Where is the word that holds ALL I am trying to say?' asks Shelby Stephenson in the Prologue to Fiddledeedee. He unleashes a poetic answer that plays and keens, singing its long journey home, immersing us in the living language of a place, the East Carolina flatlands. With three-line stanzas, often breathtaking, Stephenson leads us through the lay of his ancestral land. He gives voice to his place and its people and does so unashamedly, with passion and precision, and, yes, with real country music."—Kathryn Stripling Byer, former Poet Laureate of North Carolina
Shelby Stephenson lives on the small farm where he was born near Benson, in the Coastal Plain of North Carolina. "Most of my poems come out of that background," he says, "where memory and imagination play on one another." Educated at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he is professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina-Pembroke, and served as editor of the international literary journal Pembroke Magazine from 1979 until his retirement in 2010. His awards include the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Memorial Award, North Carolina Network Chapbook Prize, Bright Hill Press Chapbook Award, and the Brockman-Campbell Poetry Prize. He has published a poetic documentary Plankhouse (with photographs by Roger Manley), plus ten chapbooks, most recently Steal Away (Jacar Press). Family Matters: Homage to July, the Slave Girl won the 2008 Bellday Poetry Prize and the 2009 Oscar Arnold Young Award. The state of North Carolina presented Shelby with the 2001 North Carolina Award in Literature, and in 2014 he was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. He will be installed as North Carolina's eighth poet laureate this year.
Hats Off! to Ruth Moose whose short story "Born Mean" appears in the January 2015 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Moose's first novel, Doing it at the Dixie Dew, won the Malice Award and was published by St. Martin's Press.
Hats Off! to Kathy Ackerman of Tryon who received an honorable mention for her poem "April 19, 1906" in the Rash Award in Poetry sponsored by the Broad River Review. Tina Barr of Black Mountain; Terri Kirby Erickson of Lewisville; Janet Joyner of Winston-Salem; and Alice Osborn of Raleigh were named finalists.
Hats Off! to Kim Church whose debut novel, Byrd, won the 2015 Crook's Corner Book Prize. The prize honors an exceptional debut novel set in the American South. Church will receive a $1,000 prize and a free glass of wine for a year from Crook's Corner, in Chapel Hill.
Hats Off! to Laurie McKay whose debut novel, Villain Keeper (HarperCollins Feb 2015), is featured on the Winter Kids' Indie Next List, in the 9-12 year old group.
To by Scott Owens
Main Street Rag$15, paperbackISBN: 978-1-59948-505-8November, 2014PoetryAvailable from the publisher
"In To, Scott Owens illustrates the joy, frustration, and oxymoronic nature of writing poetry. Only someone who is deeply committed to and believes in the art and craft of poetry could compile such a compelling collection of ars poetica. In fact, the titles alone compel: "The Sun Was Like an Oxymoron," "Arse Poetica," "On the Recent Reports of the Death of Poetry," and so on. This is poetry for the smart reader, the common reader, the reader who's not sure if poetry is his or her thing but is willing to give it a shot. In To, Owens promises to sway all comers. Once I started reading this collection, I couldn't put it down until the very end."—Robert Lee Brewer, author of Solving the World's Problems and editor of Poet's Market
"Scott Owens' To is a masterful collection of poems on the subject of poetry, such that poetry as a genre acts as the singular ordering device for this most fascinating and valuable contribution to our understandings of the genre. Owens' poems are replete with insight, humor, wisdom, compassion, irony, honesty, and an unassailable knowledge; Owens is both an experienced and very talented poet, both sides everywhere on display throughout To. Buy this book, read it, and let anyone borrow it; each reader will enjoy, learn, profit, and grow––poetry fan or not, whether twenty or four times twenty."—Ronald Moran
"Poetry, Scott Owens assures us, owes nothing to anyone. This claim is well substantiated by the poems in To, where Owens uses such classic elements as line and stanza, image and rhyme to heighten language in ways that can't be ignored or denied. Given even half a chance, these poems will carry their readers from whimsy to grief, from despair to delight. They will take readers forward and take them back, from the simple human need to be about to the business of making words do what they must, and thus, in making art, to mean."—Phebe Davidson
Scott Owens is originally from Greenwood, SC. He holds degrees from Ohio University, UNC Charlotte, and UNC Greensboro and currently lives in Hickory, NC, where he teaches at Catawba Valley Community College, edits Wild Goose Poetry Review and 234, writes for the Outlook Newspaper, and serves as vice-president of the NC Poetry Society. His previous ten books have received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, the Next Generation/Indie Lit Awards, the North Carolina Writers' Network, the NC Poetry Society, and the Poetry Society of SC.
The Narratives: Evolution by Vince Guaglione
Create Space Independent Publishing Platform$6.95, paperback / $0.99, e-bookISBN: 978-1500260842June, 2014Personal growth, Personal transformation, Philosophy/Consciousness and ThoughtAvailable from www.Amazon.com
The Narratives is a collection of short introspective essays written by an average guy in an effort to better understand himself, his life, and his relationship with the world around him while traveling the road of self-discovery. This series can best be described as the author's unique brand of journaling, encompassing both self-reflective entries, and an expression of thought and opinion surrounding social issues of the present day.
The Narratives: Evolution documents a new chapter in the author's personal growth, following a period of instability, grief, and mourning brought on by the death of a loved one. Each short journal-style essay presented in this work touches on the author's search for substance, depth, and purpose, and is written with full transparency, providing the reader with a unique window into the author's soul.
The Narratives: Evolution, is the fourth volume in The Narratives series.
Vince Guaglione is a guy who asks lots of questions, not only of himself but of his society and the world around him. Although he claims he's found no real answers, that hasn't stopped him in his quest to gain perspective on a little something we call life. When he's not at his real job, you can find him sucking down venti-sized coffees at a brisk pace his local Starbucks, thinking up new writing projects, or pondering his mystery questions of life. Originally from Philadelphia PA, Vince now resides in Raleigh NC.
While working on working his Narratives series, Vince pulled together some ideas from his youth and crafted two stories, classified in the short fictional realm, titled "Chasing Angels" and "Eva."
NORTH CAROLINA—Welcome to the new website of the North Carolina Writers' Network! Things are grouped a little differently now than they were on our old site, so here are a few tips to help you get oriented:
At the top of the page is a menu bar. If you're looking for any information about the Network, including contact info, it's under "About Us."
If you're looking for information about conferences, competitions, or hunting for our events calendar, that's under "Programs and Services."
Hats Off!, Book Buzz, and other sections that showcase our members are under "Our Members."
And if you're a member of NCWN, you can sign in and then access the "Members Only" section, which includes "Opportunities" and contacts for "Literary Agents and Editors." But you must be a current member, and you must sign in, to access this section.
Below the menu bar are graphics which link to our White Cross School Blog, the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame, and one of our current contests, the 2014 Doris Betts Fiction Prize.
A bit farther down the right-hand side of the page is a menu of links. In redesigning our site, we decided there are other organizations who keep much better databases of things like funding opportunities, literary magazines, and publishers than we ever could. So most of these menu items link to trustworthy, outside sites. Enjoy!
Another major change is that, in order to submit your news to Hats Off! or Book Buzz, or submit an event for an inclusion in our events calendar, there's no longer any need to e-mail us. Simply click on the link(s) provided, fill out the appropriate form, and we'll take care of the rest.
The Secret of Isobel Key by Jen McConnel
Bloomsbury Spark $4.99, e-book ISBN: 9781619634640 December, 2013 Fiction, YA Available from the publisher or www.Amazon.com
Lou is in the middle of a quarter-life crisis. Fresh out of college, she's unemployed and unsure of herself. But when she gets the chance to escape to Scotland with her best friend, it could be the answer to her quest for self-discovery. The trip is not at all what she expected, especially when her tour guide turns out to be the dreamy historian Brian, and together they embark on a hunt for information about Isobel Key, a woman accused of witchcraft in the seventeenth century.
They set out to learn the truth of the condemned witch, but Lou isn't prepared for the knowledge that awaits her. She must face her own demons if she has any hope of righting the wrongs of the past.
Flashing between the seventeenth century and modern day Scotland, The Secret of Isobel Key is a mystery that will please readers of all ages.
Jen McConnel first began writing poetry as a child. A Michigander by birth, she now lives and writes in the beautiful state of North Carolina. When she isn't crafting worlds of fiction, she teaches college writing composition and yoga. Once upon a time, she was a middle school teacher, a librarian, and a bookseller, but those are stories for another time.
Visit http://www.jenmcconnel.com to learn more.
Hats Off! to Linda Heuring whose short story "Without Goosebumps" appears in Rosebud, Issue 56.
Hats Off! to Mark J. Havlik whose poem "The Lamb" appears in issue number 68 of Kaleidoscope: Exploring the Experience of Disability through Literature and the Fine Arts. Unique to the field of disability studies, the publication has expressed the experiences of disability from the perspective of individuals, families, friends, caregivers, and healthcare professionals, among others, since 1979.
Hats Off! to Fuquay-Varina's Third Thursday Open Mic, which was featured in the Southwest Wake News. Led by Jan B. Parker, this event gathers professional and novice writers from all over the Triangle at 6:00 pm at the Stars Theater & Arts Center. There is a Featured Reader, and Open Mic participants read for five minutes each.
Eye of the Beholder by Scott Owens
Main Street Rag $15, paperback ISBN: 978-1-59948-441-9 January, 2014 Poetry Available from the publisher
"The poetry of Scott Owens traces the contours of loss and hope, possibility and renewal. A heartfelt quality or soulfulness, best defined as the determination to speak honestly and courageously of important personal matters, pervades this book and gives it emotional urgency page after page. Drawn to what he calls 'a poetics of excess,' Owens nevertheless embodies Cocteau's definition of tact—'knowing how far to go in going too far'—while striking a similar balance between long poems and haiku-like or koan-like short ones, which provide a kind of seasoning for the feast of the whole. Especially notable at the book's center is a love poem Neruda would have been happy to write, the laser-intense 'You in the Tomb of My Eyes,' a paean to the night that anchors the surrounding testimonies to a life lived passionately and thoughtfully. Owens knows poetry is a serious business; while various other poets these days might seem caught up in gamesmanship, this poet plays for keeps."—Philip Dacey, Editor of Strong Measures
Not love poems exactly, but certainly poems about love.
Originally from Greenwood, SC, Scott Owens holds degrees from Ohio University, UNC Charlotte, and UNC Greensboro. He currently lives in Hickory, NC, where he teaches at Catawba Valley Community College, edits Wild Goose Poetry Review and 234, writes for the Outlook Newspaper, and serves as vice-president of the NC Poetry Society. Eye of the Beholder is his 11th book of poetry. His work has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, the Next Generation/Indie Lit Awards, the NC Writers Network, the NC Poetry Society, and the Poetry Society of SC. His website is www.scottowenspoet.com.
Hats Off! to Malinda Fillingim whose article "Riding Bikes to Church" has been selected for publication in Carolina Country.
Starting Over by Elizabeth Spencer
Liverlight $24.95, hardcover ISBN: 978-0871406811 January, 2014 Fiction Available from your local bookstore or www.Amazon.com
One of the masters of American short fiction—author of The Light in the Piazza—returns with a new collection of stories.
On the release of her first novel in 1948, Elizabeth Spencer was immediately championed by Robert Penn Warren and Eudora Welty, setting off a remarkable career as one of the great literary voices of the American South. Her career, now spanning seven decades, continues here with nine new stories. In Starting Over, Spencer returns to the deep emotional fault lines and unseen fractures that lie just beneath the veneer of happy family life. In "Sightings," a troubled daughter suddenly returns to the home of the father she accidently blinded during her parents' bitter separation; in "Blackie," the reappearance of a son from a divorcee's first marriage triggers a harrowing confrontation with her new family; while in "The Wedding Visitor," a cousin travels home only to find himself entwined in the events leading up to a family wedding. In these nine stories, Spencer excels at revealing the flawed fabric of human relations.
Malcolm Jones called one of the stories in the book, "On the Hill," one of the "best stories I've ever read" in the New York Times Sunday Book Review.
Elizabeth Spencer is regarded as one of America's most outstanding fiction writers. Spencer was born in Carrollton, Mississippi, in 1921 to a storytelling and book-loving family in a community steeped in the oral traditions of the South, and subsequently set many of her works in the hill country and deltas of Mississippi and Louisiana. The author of nine novels, many fine short stories, and the famous novella The Light in the Piazza, Spencer has received the Award of Merit Medal for the Short Story from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, of which she is a member. She has also been awarded the Cleanth Brooks Medal by the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. Many of her stories and short fiction have recently been collected, along with six new stories, in The Southern Woman (2001), published to wide critical acclaim. She is a member of the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame.
Hats Off! to Jan B. Parker who has a short story in Voices From the Porch, a new anthology from Main Street Rag. She also has a short story in Writing Through Your Divorce: The Blog.
Hats Off! to Terri Kirby Erickson whose award-winning poem, "Angels of Death," from her forthcoming collection, A Lake of Light and Clouds, (which will be published by Press 53 in April), has been set to music by composer and Vice President of Education for the New York Philharmonic, Theodore Wiprud, as part of a cycle for soprano, on varied poems of life, death, and nature. Wiprud refers to the poem as, "a humorous take on mortality that sneaks up on you," from a book of poems that "opens from the everyday onto the profound."
Hats off! to Thomas Wolf, whose short story, "Boundaries," winner of the 2011 Doris Betts Fiction Prize, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and received "Special Mention" in the 2014 edition of Pushcart Prize XXXVIII: Best of the Small Presses.
NORTH CAROLINA—The 2014 Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition is now open for submissions. This contest awards the first-place winner $200 and publication in storySouth.
The 2014 Randall Jarrell Competition is open to any writer who is a legal resident of North Carolina or a member of the North Carolina Writers' Network. Submissions should be one poem only (40-line limit). The contest deadline is March 1.
The final judge is Jillian Weise, author of The Book of Goodbyes (BOA Editions, 2013), which received the 2013 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, which recognizes a superior second book of poetry by an American poet. Her debut poetry collection, The Amputee's Guide to Sex, was published by Soft Skull Press in 2007. Weise is also the author of the novel The Colony (Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press, 2010). Her other honors include a Fulbright Fellowship and the 2013 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award from BOA Editions. She teaches at Clemson University and lives in Greenville, South Carolina.
storySouth is an online literary journal dedicated to showcasing the best poetry (and fiction and creative nonfiction) that writers from the "new south" have to offer. Facilitated by the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at UNCG, storySouth aims to prove that "the internet is not just a medium of flash and style; that excellent writing can attract attention without programming gimmicks and hard-to-read fonts." storySouth believes the American South today is a "mix of traditional and new, regional and international." Published poets include Cathy Smith Bowers, Al Maginnes, Dannye Romine Powell, and Elizabeth Swann.
This competition honors the work and legacy of the poet and critic Randall Jarrell, who taught at what is now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro for nearly eighteen years. The competition is administered by Terry L. Kennedy and the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at UNCG.
Alan Michael Parker won the 2013 Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition for his poem, "The Ladder." Joseph Mills, Katherine Soniat, and Ross White received honorable mentions.
Here are the eligibility requirements and guidelines:
Terry L. Kennedy MFA Writing Program 3302 MHRA Building UNC Greensboro Greensboro, NC 27402-6170
Hats Off! to Margaret A. Harrell who will be having a reading/talk/signing event at the 2014 annual Gonzo Fest in Louisville, Kentucky, for her memoirs (Keep This Quiet! My Relationship with Hunter S. Thompson, Milton Klonsky, and Jan Mensaert AND Keep THIS Quiet Too!). Others presenters include William McKeen (Outlaw Journalist), Anita Thompson (The Gonzo Way), and legendary musician David Amram. Sony Pictures will debut the Ralph Steadman documentary For No Good Reason at the Louisville Palace Theatre during the GonzoFest, weeks before its national release.
Revenge on the Fly by Michael Cavender
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform $14.99, paperback / $8.95, e-book ISBN: 978-1484915103 November, 2013 Fiction Available from your local bookstore or www.Amazon.com
"Revenge on the Fly is a beautiful meditation on the ties that bind us to family and place. Michael Cavender is a gifted writer, an exciting new voice in North Carolina literature."—Ron Rash, New York Times best-selling author of Serena and The Cove
"Cavender's potent homage to ancient old growth forests and the power of nature juxtaposes nicely against the very real threat of development, but there's more at work with the complex Phelps siblings. Revenge on the Fly is an engrossing mix of atmosphere and strongly drawn characters, with Ben Phelps at its center unraveling the darkness that lies at the heart of his family's secrets. Compelling and well-written, Cavender's writing draws readers into his tale of evil control, redemption, and the power of hope." —Marni Graff, author, The Blue Virgin , The Green Remains
Dissolute outdoor writer Ben Phelps grasps the chance to avenge a life-ruining lie despite the human costs to a friend who holds the means for revenge, and to the woman whose love may reward his boldness.
Decades ago, Watt Phelps told his younger brother Ben a lie that drove him into dark despair and disinheritance from a family fortune. When a pathway opens for overdue vengeance, retribution demands Ben's willingness to send his brother to prison, as well as the new friend who secretes the crime that's the key to justice. The pathway also opens Ben's heart to prove to a suspicious woman he's worthy of her trust and love. These converging challenges might save Ben's unknown legacy, the last old-growth forest in the Blue Ridge Mountains, from Watt's destruction, and restore a life tainted by his brother's duplicity. In Revenge on the Fly, Ben learns that his bitter perceptions of success and failure are only part of his life-long delusions, and that loving completely means risking everything.
Michael Cavender is a North Carolina writer who directed the Highlands-Cashiers Land Trust, North Carolina's oldest land conservation trust. He was also a newspaper reporter and fly-fishing guide on the rivers and streams of the southern Blue Ridge Mountains. A graduate of The University of Tennessee, he lives near Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he is working on his next novel, a crime thriller.
Hats Off! to Malinda Fillingim whose story "Bathroom Blessings" has been accepted by Guideposts to be published in May, 2014.
Drop Dead Gorgeous: L.A. Vamps Book One by Suki McMinn
Temptress Press $3.99, e-book ASIN: B00HORWK28 January, 2014 Fiction Available from www.Amazon.com
Derek Randall is an L.A. supermodel who's made a vampire, but longs to return to the life he loved. With the help of his true love, Clara, an unemployed modeling agent who's just getting used to being bitten, as well as his nest of hunky "brothers," he struggles to learn what it is to be a vampire. He and Clara launch his new modeling career, and Derek begins a dangerous game, trying to keep his evil maker, Madeline, at bay. Derek will sacrifice everything to save Clara—his career, his vampire brothers, and even his very existence. Love gives Derek more strength than dark magic ever could.
Suki McMinn grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, has an English Literature degree from the University of Tennessee, and spent most of her adult life in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles. She now lives in Tryon, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina with her husband and rescued dogs. She's also a photographer, potter, and fiber artist.
Hats Off! to Charles "LC" Fiore, whose short story "The Trench Garden," was published by Ploughshares as part of their "Solos" series. Amazon.com also chose "The Trench Garden" for their exclusive Kindle Singles series. "The Trench Garden" can be purchased for $0.99 here.
Hats Off to Laurel Ferejohn whose flash memoir piece "Worrisome Thing" has been accepted by Quiddity International Literary Journal.
Hats Off! to Kim Church whose debut novel, Byrd (Dzanc Books, March 2014), has been named one of the top 20 to-read books of the year (David Abrams, The Quivering Pen). Set in North Carolina and points west, Byrd is the fragmented family history of a child given up for adoption.
Hats Off! to Jan B. Parker whose story "A New and Different Summer," an excerpt from her novel-in-progress, will be published by GERM magazine.
Curing Time by Tim Swink
Pegasus Books $16.95, paperback ISBN: 978-0-9910993-1-3 December, 2013 Fiction Available at your local bookstore or www.Amazon.com
Curing Time is tobacco's season of harvest, a time of transformation when the leaf is made golden by subjection to fire and heat. Tobacco farmer Hume Rankin endures his own curing time in the summer of 1959. When the rains won't come and the crops wilt in the field, he solicits the magic of a blind, old black woman. She warns about the dangers of calling on the middle world and tells him once those spirits are unleashed, it is they who decide when and how the spell unfolds. Hume dismisses her warning, to his peril. When his life-long nemesis, whose always had his eye on Hume's land as well as his wife, is found dead, all eyes are on Hume. He faces the all-too real possibility of losing his land, his family and even his life. Sitting in a jail cell, uncertain of his own innocence, he finds himself lost and a long way from home. Recalling the old woman's warning, he is haunted by the possibility that he may have played a part in his own demise.
Tim Swink studied Legal Administration at Greensboro College and has worked in the legal profession for over twenty years. He is winding down his "day job" and has come home to his first love, writing. Prior to his legal career, he was the Managing Editor of a weekly newspaper in Moore County. He has worked for USA Today, the Greensboro News and Record, Tarheel Magazine, and is currently a contributing writer for O.Henry Magazine. A sequel to Curing Time is in the works, as well as a third book entitled, Madd Inlet which takes place at Sunset Beach, North Carolina, in 1968-1969, during the turbulent crux of the Vietnam war. Tim is the grandson of a North Carolina tobacco farmer and has peeled the caked tobacco juice from his hands, as well. Tim and his wife, Renee, reside in Greensboro.
Hats Off! to Marilynn Barner Anselmi whose script, Found Objects, has been named a semi-finalist for the 2014 Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference. This is the third consecutive year her work has made it to the semi-finalist stage.
Extinction by H.V. Purvis
Second Wind Publishing Co. $13.95, paperback / $4.99, e-book ISBN 978-1-938101-60-1 October, 2013 Fiction Available from www.Amazon.com
Try to imagine a future where almost all your family and friends become infected with a virus that made them stronger and more agile, grow fur, develop claws, lose the ability to reason or be able to speak and become murderously violent toward anyone not infected. Now imagine this rage being so consuming that they continue to attack until either they or you are dead.
This is the world in which our heroes find themselves. What must they do to survive? Are there other survivors out there?
Hoyle Purvis, who writes under the name H.V. Purvis, was born in 1952 and reared in the country between High Falls and Bennett in central North Carolina. Raised in the country, he learned to raise animals, farm, handle guns, shoot, ride horses and spent many hours daily riding the trails around his home.
His talents in music lead to an Associate in Arts degree in music from Sandhills Community College, a Bachelor in Arts in music education from Pfeiffer University and a Masters in music from Appalachian State University. After college, he worked as a church music director and taught high school chorus and theatre. In 1992, he left teaching and started Purvis Appraisals, a real estate appraisal business.
He has three children from his first marriage. He considers them to be three of his best friends.
He and Ally, his current wife, live on a small ranch in Scotland County adjoining forty-three thousand acres of State wildlife preserve. They have eleven horses, a faithful dog, an affectionate cat, some Guinea hens and a few chickens. They ride regularly on the wildlife preserve, at the beach, and in the mountains.
Purvis is an avid reader. Several years ago, he and his active imagination developed a story idea. He wrote it out and began to developed it into the Extinction series. That story and the encouragement he received from his friends and family have led to an obsession for writing.
Hats Off! to Steve Cushman whose poetry manuscript In Training received an Honorable Mention in the first annual Lena M. Shull Book Contest from the North Carolina Poetry Society.
Hats Off! to Becky Gould Gibson whose manuscript Heading Home won the first annual Lena M. Shull Book Contest. The Lena Shull Book Contest was recently created by an endowment from the North Carolina Poetry Council. Gibson will receive $250 and 50 copies of her book, which will be published by Main Street Rag. The award will be presented to her on Poetry Day at Catawba Valley Community College in April 2014.
NORTH CAROLINA—If you are a writer of creative nonfiction, who has been on the fence about sending in an entry to the Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Competition, then now would be a good time to hop down and submit.
Thanks to a generous donation from Rose Post's family, the prize amounts that will be awarded for the top three entries in this contest have been increased: $200 for 3rd Place; $300 for 2nd Place; and $1,000 for 1st Place.
The winning entry will still be considered for publication by Southern Cultures magazine, as well.
The Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Competition encourages the creation of lasting nonfiction that is outside the realm of conventional journalism and has relevance to North Carolinians. Subjects may include traditional categories such as reviews, travel articles, profiles or interviews, place/history pieces, or culture criticism.
The postmark deadline for entries into the 2014 contest is Friday, January 17. Online submissions must be received before midnight on that date.
This year's final judge is Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams, whose novella The Man Who Danced with Dolls won a 2013 Whiting Writers' Awards of $50,000, one of the richest prizes in American literature. She holds an MFA ('07) from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she now teaches in the English Department. She is the recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Writer's Award, a Hartshook Fellowship, and a Byington Award. Born on Guam, Abrams is currently at work on her memoir, The Following Sea, about growing up on a cutter that made port throughout the South Pacific.
Rose Post worked for the Salisbury Post for fifty-six years as a reporter, feature writer, and columnist. She won numerous state and national awards for her writing and earned the N.C. Press Women's top annual award four times. She received the O. Henry Award from the Associated Press three times, the Pete Ivey Award, and the School Bell Award for educational coverage. Nationally, she won the 1989 Ernie Pyle Award, the Scripps Howard Foundation National Journalism Award for human-interest writing, and the 1994 National Society of Newspaper Columnists' Award.
Here are the complete guidelines:
Hats Off! to Erika Hoffman who had two stories selected as finalists for Chicken Soup for the Soul: Multitasking Mom's Survival Guide. One is called "BUSY!," and the other "Frenzied." Both stories will be published in the anthology.
Hats Off! to Malinda Fillingim whose story "The Marine and I" was a finalist in the inaugural memoir writing contest sponsored by Salt, a Wilmington-based magazine. Also, her story "Lucy the Lunchroom Lady" was recently accepted for publication in Guideposts.
Hats Off! to Heather Adams, Caryn Sutorus, and Pam Van Dyk who received Honorable Mentions in the 2013 Fiction Contest sponsored by The Writers' Workshop.
NORTH CAROLINA—The 2014 Doris Betts Fiction Prize is now open for submissions. The Doris Betts Fiction Prize awards the first-place winner $250 and publication in the North Carolina Literary Review. Finalists will also be considered for publication in the NCLR.
For over twenty years, East Carolina University and the North Carolina Literary & Historical Association have published the North Carolina Literary Review, a journal devoted to showcasing the Tar Heel State's literary excellence. Described by one critic as "everything you ever wanted out of a literary publication but never dared to demand," the NCLR has won numerous awards and citations.
The Doris Betts Fiction Prize is open to any writer who is a legal resident of North Carolina or a member of the North Carolina Writers' Network. North Carolina Literary Review subscribers with North Carolina connections (lives or has lived in NC) are also eligible.
The final judge is NCLR fiction editor Liza Wieland (left). She the author of seven books and three collections of short fiction. She has won two Pushcart Prizes, the Michigan Literary Fiction Prize, a Bridport Prize in the UK, and fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The North Carolina Arts Council, and the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. She has recently been awarded a second fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council.
Claudette Cohen of Carolina Beach won the 2013 Doris Betts Fiction Prize for her story, "The Mayor of Biscoe."
Doris Betts was the author of three short story collections and six novels. She won three Sir Walter Raleigh awards, the Southern Book Award, the North Carolina Award for Literature, the John Dos Passos Prize, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Medal for the short story, among others. Beloved by her students, she was named the University of North Carolina Alumni Distinguished Professor of English in 1980.
Here are the guidelines for the 2014 Doris Betts Fiction Prize:
The Doris Betts Fiction Prize awards the first-prize winner $250 and publication in the North Carolina Literary Review. Finalists will also be considered for publication in the NCLR.
The winner and finalists will be announced in April. The winning story and select finalists will be published in the next year's issue of the North Carolina Literary Review.
The nonprofit North Carolina Writers' Network is the state's oldest and largest literary arts services organization devoted to writers at all stages of development. For additional information, visit www.ncwriters.org.
A Piece of Calm by Sally Stewart Mohney
Finishing Line Press $14.00, paperback Poetry March, 2014 Available for pre-order from the publisher
"Sally Stewart Mohney gives us vivid insights into nature and family in these excellent poems, but what I admire just as much is the superb sound-play in her poetry."—Ron Rash, author of Sabrina
"Sally Stewart Mohney's poems sing with mystery, but they are never ethereal, never ephemeral or buried in obliquity. Instead, Mohney's world is rooted in stunning imagery and clarity, and her poems are designed with care and grace. They are bold, luminous, and tender, gathered together to form vivid silences that reside in both heart and mind. Their lyricism and incandescence demand multiple readings. Mohney is a new and significant voice in American poetry."—William Wright, editor of The Southern Poetry Anthology
Hats Off! to Erika Hoffman whose essay "Real Time" has been accepted by Mature Years. This is the ninth piece of hers they have taken.
Reversal by Eric Linne
CreateSpace $13.99, paperback / $6.99, e-book ISBN: 978-0-1492196549 November, 2013 Fiction—Young Adult Available from your local bookstore or www.Amazon.com
Fourteen-year-old Kayla Burbadge has had one tough life. She's lost her parents, been forced to move from bustling Chicago to a small Indiana farm town, and starts high school with no friends. How tough is she? When a janitor sees her fighting an older boy who made the mistake of picking on her, the janitor offers her a unique opportunity. Reluctantly, Kayla accepts and the new kid in school becomes the first and only girl to compete in a male-dominated environment. As Kayla battles her way through her new endeavor, her self-confidence grows as she bonds with her new allies. Her emotional growth helps her connect with her new family and display empathy for other students who are suffering. In the end, she faces a final pivotal challenge—a challenge that means not only victory for her, but a job for the janitor who believed in her.
Reversal is a realistic, present-day novel which merges a coming-of-age drama with a fast-action sports story. The novel explores the themes of family, home, community, unlikely heroes, discovering one's voice, and finding equilibrium after a major life event.
Eric Linne has a BA in English from Indiana University and MA in English from University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Prior to embarking on a writing career, he worked as a consultant for community health centers nationwide and and served as Director for Home Care for the American Hospital Association. After several years as a stay-at-home father, Eric wrote his first screenplay, The Bears of Blue River, adapted from the novel of the same name. The young adult novel Reversal, which he wrote as his Master's Thesis in Children's Literature, is his debut novel. He is excited to see where Kayla's career leads.
Hats Off! to Malinda Fillingim whose story "Easter Bells" has been published in the Spring 2014 edition of Ideals, a publication of Guidepost.
Hats Off! to Tim Swink. The January issue of O.Henry Magazine is going to publish a chapter excerpt from his novel, Curing Time.
Hats Off! to Terry L. Kennedy, who has a poem in the latest issue of Heavy Feather Review!
America One: The Launch by TI Wade
TI Wade $5.99, Kindle ASIN: B00B2GC0IQ January, 2013 Fiction Available at www.Amazon.com
Ryan Richmond has dreamed about going to space since the age of seven. Reading space updates—and seeing pictures of Neil Armstrong on the lunar surface in National Geographic—was the ignition of this dream.
At nineteen he sold his first company and employed the remnants of the Russian Space Program, three of the best space brains in the world.
In his twenties he founded and sold two more companies and hired the most outstanding scientists and engineers from the European Space Authority.
During his thirties, after selling his third company, he invested heavily in Internet start-ups, like Google, netting billions.
Then he patiently waited until NASA's shuttle program came to an end and contracted the best brains in the U.S. Space program.
Now, Ryan Richmond is in his forties, and still wants to go to space.
The only problem is that the newly elected Administration and members of Congress don't have a current space program, and they want his!
TI Wade grew up in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and once he completed his mandatory military commitments at 23, left Africa to mature in Europe. He enjoyed Europe and lived in three countries throughout fifteen years: England, Germany and Portugal. He enjoyed learning their ways of life, and languages, before returning to Africa: Cape Town in 1989. There he owned and ran a restaurant, a coffee manufacturing and retail business, flew a Cessna 210 around desolate southern Africa, and achieved marriage in 1992.
Due to the upheavals of the political turmoil in South Africa, the Wade family of three moved to the United States in 1996. Park City, Utah, was where his writing career began in 1997. To date, he has written nine novels. Currently, he lives with his wife and two teenage children twenty miles south of Raleigh. His first series, INVASION USA, has been a top-selling hit series, addressing the question, What could happen if every bit of technology created in China in the past thirty years were to all shut down at once? His current series, AMERICA ONE, is another hard-hitting series, with a greater focus on technology and space exploration.
TI Wade is on the web at www.tiwade.com.
Another F-Word: A Novel by Lissa Brown
CreateSpace Kindle, $6.99 / Paperback, $15.95 ISBN: 978-1481908450 January, 2013 Fiction Available at www.Amazon.com
Gentle Rory Calhoun Wilson is the antithesis of the 1950s cowboy he's named for. He loathes sports, NASCAR, and everything else his father adores, putting the two on a collision course fueled by Darrell Wilson's inability to control contempt for his son's emerging homosexuality. Another F-Word is a story of bullying, courage, and love. It examines parental struggles to support a gay child, the role that schools and religious institutions play, the tragedy of teen suicide, and the ability of a rural Bible Belt boy to remain open to people who can influence his life in remarkable ways. Rory's is a story of triumph over the scarring effects of being labeled and bullied.
Each of Lissa Brown's careers has contributed to her current one, full-time author. She gained insight into adolescent behavior as a high school teacher and honed her writing skills and sense of the absurd during award-winning careers in marketing and public relations. She's been a media consultant to gubernatorial and legislative campaigns, a columnist, and speechwriter for public officials and corporate executives. She is the author of a humorous memoir, a young adult novel, and several published articles and essays. Another F-Word is her latest novel. www.lissabrownwrites.com.
Hats Off! to Ross White, who has three new poems in BODY.
School of the Americas by David Rigsbee
Black Lawrence Press $14.00, paperback ISBN: 978-0-9837945-0-9 January, 2013 Poetry Available from the publisher, your local bookstore, or www.Amazon.com
"David Rigsbee's poems move with philosophical intensities. The perspectives the poems offer are complex, highly nuanced, rooted in critical engagements with a cultural tradition, and often less comfortable than the refusal of perspective practiced by more vertiginous writers." —Robert McNama
David Rigsbee is the author of 18 books and chapbooks, including seven previous full-length collections of poems. His latest books, The Red Tower: New & Selected Poems and The Pilot House, a Black River Poetry Prize Chapbook, were both recently released. In addition to his poems, he has also published critical works on Carolyn Kizer and Joseph Brodsky. He has co-edited two anthologies, including Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Southern Poetry, a "notable book" selection of the American Library Association and the American Association of University Professors and featured on C-Span Booknotes. His work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, The Ohio Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, and many others. Winner of the Pound Prize and the Vachel Lindsay Award, he has also been recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, The Virginia Commission on the Arts, The Djerassi Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets. He is 2010 winner of the Sam Ragan Award for contribution to the arts in North Carolina. Rigsbee is currently contributing editor for The Cortland Review.
Ink in the Wheels: Stories to Make Love Roll by S. Barton and Megan M. Cutter
Cutter's Edge Consulting, LLC $15.97, paperback ISBN: 978-1-4675-4459-7 February 15, 2013 Memoir Available from the publisher and www.Amazon.com
A groundbreaking memoir about love, disability and perseverance, Ink in the Wheels: Stories to Make Love Roll is the unlikely story of Barton and Megan Cutter, and their journey to build a successful marriage despite others expectations. Barton Cutter, who has Cerebral Palsy never expected to fall in love, never mind getting married, and Megan was still grieving over the loss of a relationship and the death of her mother. Until now, there have been few accounts of a couple that addresses the themes of disability, intimacy, and marriage. Ink in the Wheels: Stories to Make Love Roll delves into themes of family influences and dynamics, creating external and internal support networks, direct support staff and the balance of care giving, losing faith in one another and themselves—and finding it again.
Watch the book trailer here.
With a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona, Barton has created for himself and his family a life that speaks to his deepest values. His passion for helping others grow is evident in his writing, teaching martial arts, and life coaching, not to mention his ever-optimistic approach to life. He has written on disability-related issues for The Raleigh News & Observer, ABILITY Magazine, the NC Council on Developmental Disabilities, Persona Magazine, the NC Office on Disability & Health, and the NC Disability Action Network.
With a BA in English/Creative Journaling from Randolph-Macon Woman's College, Megan has focused her writing efforts by organizing local literary events and supporting the local writing community. Studying Aboriginal oral tradition in Alice Springs, Australia, she has distinctive ability to see many angles of the story and uses joy and laughter to honor these essential aspects of our stories.
Megan has published clips in Natural Awakenings, Med Monthly, News & Observer (North Raleigh News), Circa, and Jubilation. Her writing features local community organizations, emphasizes local sustainability, and brings together different communities into common goals.
The Hendersonville Times-News reported that Susan Snowden's new novel made Fountainhead Bookstore's bestseller list for 2012. Although it came out in August, it captured spot No. 2 on the list. Here's an excerpt from the Jan. 6 article: "In the No. 2 slot is another local author, Susan Snowden, with her debut novel Southern Fried Lies. Although Snowden has been published in many literary journals, this is her first novel. Through word-of-mouth alone, Southern Fried Lies quickly climbed the bestselling list, even beating out Fifty Shades of Grey." Susan has been a NCWN writer since 1996 when she moved to the mountains from Atlanta.
Hats Off! to William Wortman, Jr., of Statesville, who received an Honorable Mention in the 2012 Memoirs Contest sponsored by the Writers' Workshop.
Hats Off! to Megan M. Cutter, who announced the release of her new book, Ink in the Wheels: Stories to Make Love Roll, which she co-authored with S. Barton. Ink in the Wheels depicts the journey of an inter-ability married couple as they explore the courage and perseverance to thrive in a relationship. A Valentine's Day Appreciation Event and Pre-Release Party will be held on Friday, February 8, at the Marbles Kid's Museum in Raleigh.
Ten Poems and Eleven Paintings, Christmas 2009 by Laurence Holden
Laurence Holden $4.99, iPad December, 2012 Poetry Available on iTunes
Ten Poems and Eleven Paintings, Christmas 2009 is a book where vision and poetry gather, where sound and sight converse. These paintings and poems share something important—a concentrated form of paying attention—paying attention to what is! And what is, is both moving and still, both seen and unseen, heard and unheard. The paintings are still, yet move in our minds, thoughts, and feelings. The poems move in our minds, our thoughts, our feelings, and yet they form pooling echoes of the still and eternal present. Paintings and poems—two sides of one coin.
This electronic version includes two additional videos and is developed and adapted by Louis Leon from a handmade limited edition book the artist created and gave for a Christmas gift to friends and family in 2009.
Laurence Holden lives along Warwoman Creek in the Southern Appalachian Mountains of the US, drawing his paintings and poems from his connection to the land here. His work in paint and word are just two natural dialects for the same thing—bearing witness to the Creation. His work articulates a belief that if we can restore our understanding of the land and our relationship to it, we might save ourselves too in these perilous times.
Laurence's poems have appeared in several issues of the Chrysalis Reader, as well as in Written River, Appalachian Heritage, and The Reach of Song: The Poetry Anthology of the Georgia Poetry Society, 2011 and 2010, His work received an award of excellence from the Georgia Poetry Society in 2010 and an honorable mention from the Byron Herbert Reece Society in 2011. His paintings have appeared in over twenty solo exhibits, and are represented in over 200 public, private, and corporate collections.
Hats Off! to Ruth Moose, who had a poem in Narrative Arts that was quilted and will hang in the National Institute of Health. She also placed a poem in O'Henry Magazine, Tar River, and a short story in Pine Straw. She has also won a top award in the St. Louis Jung Society competition.
Hats Off! to Malaika King Albrecht, whose poetry collection What the Trapeze Artist Trusts (Press 53) was praised by 2013 Oscar Arnold Young Award Final Judge Robert Lee Brewer. He said, "Albrecht invites the reader to join her on the poetic trapeze act she performs" but "is always there, ready to catch the reader before sending her off again."
Hats Off! to Linda Heuring, whose short story, "Betty's Branch," was published in the September issue of 42 Magazine. Also, her short story, "One Chair Away," is in the fall issue of Concho River Review, and her story, "Bordering on Sainthood," is due out in Kestrel 29, which will be shipped to readers next week.
Hats Off! to Henry F. Tonn, whose essay-memoir "The French, and Being Odd," has been accepted by the online lit mag Lowestoft Chronicles, to be published March 1.
Near Waking by Dede Wilson
Finishing Line Press $12.00, paperback March, 2013 Poetry Available from the publisher
"Dede Wilson's Near Waking tantalizes the reader with its energetic poems that flirt with irony and age, gracefully tip-toeing around the edges of grief with a playfulness of forms that give pleasure and insight.... This is a downright exquisite gathering of poems." —Kathryn Stripling Byer, former N.C. Poet Laureate and recent inductee, N.C. Literary Hall of Fame
"You might feel a shiver...the chill of recognition, of glimpsing your daylight self and its shadow reflected in the same mirror, caught in those gauzy moments between dream and waking." —Rebecca McClanahan, author of Deep Light: New and Selected Poems and The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings.
Dede Wilson is the author of four previous books of poems: Eliza: The New Orleans Years, Glass, Sea of Small Fears, and One Nightstand, a collection of light verse in forms followed by a primer to poetic form. Four poems from Eliza: The New Orleans Years were published in Nimrod as finalists for the Pablo Neruda Prize, and the poem "Yellow Fever," published as "Hydra," was nominated for a Pushcart. Her poems have appeared in Carolina Quarterly, Spoon River Poetry Review, Poet Lore, New Orleans Poetry Review, Poem, Cream City Review, Tar River Poetry, Iodine Poetry Journal, Flyway, Southern Poetry Review, Cave Wall, South Carolina Poetry Review, Asheville Poetry Review, The Lyric, Light, and many other journals. She has published short stories, essays, and a family memoir, Fourth Child, Second Daughter. Dede is a former travel editor of the Dallas Times-Herald. A native of Louisiana, she has lived in Charlotte, North Carolina, since 1967. She and her husband have two grown sons.
Eulogy for an Imperfect Man: Poems by Maureen A. Sherbondy
Brick Road Poetry Press 15.95, paperback ISBN: 978-0-983535304-3-5 March, 2013 Poetry Available from the publisher (Pre-order and shipping is free)
"These are poems as restless as the ghosts that pass from page to page, and they'll haunt you long after you leave the last line. Sherbondy's stark images are as true as her unflinching examination of our struggle to put the dead to rest and let our pasts be past." —Barbara Presnell, Piece Work
Maureen Sherbondy's books are After the Fairy Tale, Praying at Coffee Shops, The Slow Vanishing, Weary Blues, and Scar Girl. She recently won the Spring Garden Press Robert Watson Poetry Award for The Year of Dead Fathers. The book will be published this summer. Her full-length collection, Eulogy for an Imperfect Man, is forthcoming from Brick Road Poetry Press. Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She received an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. Maureen lives in Raleigh with her three sons.
Hats Off! to Tom Hooker, winner of the 2012 Fountainhead Bookstore Fiction Contest. He will read his winning story, "The Grand Child," on Saturday, January 19 at 5:00 pm at the Fountainhead Bookstore in Hendersonville. A reception will follow.
The North Carolina Writers' Network is now accepting submissions for its annual Doris Betts Fiction Prize, administered by the North Carolina Literary Review.
The Doris Betts Fiction Prize awards $250 and publication in the NCLR to the author of the winning short story. Up to ten finalists will also be considered for publication. The contest is open to writers with North Carolina connections (who live or have lived in NC), members of the North Carolina Writers' Network, or subscribers to the NCLR.
Published since 1992 by East Carolina University and the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, the North Carolina Literary Review has won numerous awards and citations. The Doris Betts Fiction Prize honors beloved writer and teacher Doris Betts (1932-2012), who in the course of her long career won three Sir Walter Raleigh awards, the Southern Book Award, the North Carolina Award for Literature, the John Dos Passos Prize, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Medal for the short story, among other recognitions. Her Souls Raised from the Dead was on the New York Times' list of top twenty best books in 1994. Among her many other acclaimed works are The Astronomer and Other Stories, Beasts of the Southern Wild and Other Stories, and The Scarlet Thread. She was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2004.
Entries to the 2013 contest can be submitted through the NCLR's online submission process at www.nclr.ecu.edu/submissions/submit-online.html. Full submission guidelines are as follows:
The Doris Betts Fiction Prize awards the first-prize winner $250 and publication in the North Carolina Literary Review. Finalists will also be considered for publication in NCLR.
Leah Hampton of Waynesville, NC, won the 2012 Doris Betts Fiction Prize for her story, "The Saint." Gregg Cusick, Ronald Jackson, and Kathryn Lovatt received Honorable Mentions.
The non-profit North Carolina Writers' Network is the state's oldest and largest literary arts services organization devoted to writers at all stages of development. For additional information, visit www.ncwriters.org.
Hats Off! to Rosemary Royston, whose poetry appears in the current issue of Flycatcher: A Journal of Native Imagination. This is the inaugural issue of Flycatcher.
Hats Off! to Lookout Books and Edith Pearlman, whose collection, Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories , was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Hats Off! to Ross White, who pulled off a Hat Trick in the 2011 Poetry Council of North Carolina Awards. His poem "Babies Hurtling Several Stories" won the Gladys Owings Hughes Heritage Award (free verse); his poem ""Facts about Early America" incorporated rhyming couplets to win the Charles Shull Award (traditional poetry); and his "Address to Monarchs" won the James Larkin Pearson Award (free verse).
Hats Off! to poets Alice Osborn and Jane Shlensky, who were both finalists in two award categories in the 2011 Poetry Council of North Carolina Awards. Alice placed Third in the Charles Shull (traditional poetry) category with her poem "Featured Reader," and received an Honorable Mention in the James Larkin Pearson (free verse) category for her poem, "The Lesbians Next Door." Meanwhile, Jane Shlensky placed Third in the Gladys Owings Hughes Heritage category (free verse) for her poem, "The Museum of Broken Things," and received an Honorable Mention in the Ellen Johnston-Hale category (humorous verse) for her poem, "Patience."
Hats Off! to four NCWN members who were finalists for the 2011 Oscar Arnold Young Award, sponsored by the Poetry Council of North Carolina. Katherine Soniat won for her book, The Swing Girl. Julie Suk was runner-up with her collection, Lie Down with Me. And honorable mentions went to Susan M. Lefler (Rendering the Bones) and Joanna Catherine Scott (An Innocent in the House of the Dead).
Hats Off! to Kim Boykin, whose fiction debut, The Wisdom of Hair, sold to Berkley for publication in the spring of 2013. Her novel tells the story of a young woman who escapes an impoverished background to find her calling "fixing" hair, and along the way discovers what real love is and what it isn't from a quirky community of lovable women.
Hats Off! to Katherine Soniat, who was named the recipient of this year's Oscar Arnold Young Award for the best book of poetry from North Carolina for her collection entitled The Swing Girl, published by Louisiana State University Press.
The North Carolina Writers' Network is now accepting submissions for three annual competitions. These contests offer members and non-members the chance to put their work in front of industry professionals around the state--fellow authors, publishers, and editors--and gain recognition that will further their career. But the postmark deadlines are fast approaching, so the time to submit is now.
January 17 marks the deadline for the Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Competition, which encourages the creation of lasting nonfiction work that is outside the realm of conventional journalism and has relevance to North Carolinians. Subjects may include traditional categories such as reviews, travel articles, profiles or interviews, place/history pieces, or culture criticism. The first-, second-, and third-place winners will receive $300, $200, and $100 respectively. The winning entry will be considered for publication by Southern Cultures magazine. Award-winning author Anne Clinard Barnhill will be the final judge.
January 30 is the deadline for the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize honoring internationally celebrated North Carolina novelist Thomas Wolfe. The winner receives $1,000 and possible publication in The Thomas Wolfe Review. The competition is open to all writers regardless of geographical location or prior publication. Acclaimed author Josephine Humphreys will serve as the final judge.
Finally, the Network is accepting submissions for the Doris Betts Fiction Prize. This competition honors acclaimed author and North Carolina native Doris Betts. The prize awards the first-place winner $250 and publication in the North Carolina Literary Review. Finalists will also be considered for publication in NCLR. The postmark deadline is February 15.
The distinguished judges are a large part of what makes these competitions so prestigious. Anne Clinard Barnhill, who will judge the Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Competition, has signed a two-book deal with St. Martin's Press. Her debut novel, At the Mercy of the Queen, was published in January, 2012. Her poetry chapbook, Coal, Baby, will also appear in early 2012 from Finishing Line Press. She is the author of two books: What You Long For (Main Street Rag, 2009—short-story collection) and At Home in the Land of Oz: Autism, My Sister, and Me (Jessica Kingsley, 2007—memoir). Her articles and short stories have appeared in a variety of newspapers, literary anthologies, and magazines. Her work has won various awards and grants.
Josephine Humphreys, final judge of the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, is a recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is the author of Dreams of Sleep (winner of the 1985 Ernest Hemingway Award for first fiction), Rich in Love, The Fireman's Fair, and Nowhere Else on Earth.
The North Carolina Literary Review, which will choose the winner and finalists for the Doris Betts Fiction Prize, is entering its twentieth year of publication and has been called "the state's literary journal of record."
For more information on all three contests, including submission guidelines. visit www.ncwriters.org.
NORTH CAROLINA--The North Carolina Writers' Network is still accepting submissions for its 2012 Doris Betts Fiction Prize. This competition honors acclaimed author and North Carolina native Doris Betts, three-time winner of the Sir Walter Raleigh Award and recipient of the North Carolina Award for Literature, among many other honors.
Thomas Wolf of Chapel Hill won the 2011 Doris Betts Fiction Prize for his story "Boundaries." This was Mr. Wolf's second award, having also won in 2007 for his story, "Distance." "Boundaries" will be published in the 2012 issue of NCLR, along with the second-place story, "The Honey Wagon," by Joseph Cavano.
The 2011 competition drew nearly 100 entries. The Doris Betts Fiction Prize is sponsored by the Network and managed by the editorial staff of the North Carolina Literary Review. Published since 1992 by East Carolina University and the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, NCLR has won numerous awards and citations.
The Doris Betts Fiction Prize Postmark deadline: February 15 (annual) Submissions accepted: January 1 – February 15
Eligibility and Guidelines:
North Carolina Literary Review ECU Mailstop 555 English Greenville, NC 27858-4353
Poet and editor Dan Albergotti, the winner of the 2005 Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition, will judge this year's Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition.
Submissions for this year's Jarrell contest are now open, until the March 1 postmark deadline.
A graduate of the MFA program at UNC Greensboro and former poetry editor of The Greensboro Review, Albergotti currently teaches creative writing and literature courses and edits the online journal Waccamaw (www.waccamawjournal.com) at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina. He is the author of The Boatloads (BOA Editions, 2008), selected by Edward Hirsch as the winner of the 2007 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and Pushcart Prize XXXIII: Best of the Small Presses.
The Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition honors the work and legacy of the poet and critic Randall Jarrell, who taught at what is now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro for nearly eighteen years.
The contest accepts one-poem submissions. The winner receives $200, publication in The Crucible literary journal, and an invitation to read his or her poetry at UNC Greensboro's Founders Day activities.
Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition Postmark deadline: March 1 (annual)
Eligibility and Guidelines
The winner will be announced in May.
Send submissions, indicating name of competition, to: Terry Kennedy MFA Writing Program 3302 MHRA Building UNC Greensboro Greensboro, NC 27402-6170
Checks should be made payableto the North Carolina Writers' Network.
.... to Tony Brown. He will have his short story, "A Once In A Lifetime Thing" published in Down in the Dirt magazine in April, 2011. "The Easter Gift" was published in the September 2010 issue of The Storyteller.
. . . to Jan B. Parker, who earned Second Place in the Methodist University 2011 Emerging Writers Contest as judged by Lorraine Lopez, and will read from her work, "Mayme," at the Southern Writers' Symposium on February 26. Please visit http://www.methodist.edu/sws/index.htm for more detailed information.
Publishers Weekly and BookList wrote favorable reviews of David Halperin's new book, Journal of a UFO Investigator. You can read these on David Halperin's website
Halperin will also be doing a series of guest blogs for www.litfestmagazine.com
Rachel Pollock's piece entitled, "Until Morale Improves" was included in the anthology, Confessions: Fact or Fiction?, edited by Herta Feely.
Website: http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Herta-Feely-Chrysalis-Editorial/dp/1609106091/
Hats Off to Lookout Books, the literary imprint of the UNC-Wilmington's creative writing department. The imprint's debut novel, Binocular Vision: New & Selected Short Stories, by Edith Pearlman, was featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review's January 16 edition.
The North Carolina Writers' Network is now accepting submissions for its annual Doris Betts Fiction Prize, administered by the North Carolina Literary Review.
The Doris Betts Fiction Prize awards $250 and publication in the NCLR to the author of the winning short story, up to 6,000 words. The contest is open to any writer who is a legal resident of North Carolina, a member of the North Carolina Writers' Network, or a subscriber to the NCLR.
Robert Wallace of Durham won the 2010 Betts prize for his story "As Breaks the Wave Upon the Sea."
Entries to the 2011 contest can be submitted through the NCLR's online submission process at www.nclr.ecu.edu/submissions/submit-online.html. Full submission guidelines, including entry fees, are listed below.
Doris Betts Fiction Prize Postmark Deadline: February 15 (annual) Submissions Accepted from January 1 – February 15
The Doris Betts Fiction Prize awards the first-prize winner $250 and publication in the North Carolina Literary Review. Finalists will also be considered for publication in the NCLR.
Eligibility and Guidelines
$10/NCWN members and/or NCLR subscribers $20/nonmembers (must be a North Carolina resident)
North Carolina Literary Review ECU Mailstop 555 English Greenville, NC 27858-4353
The winner and finalists will be announced in May. Winning story and select finalists will be published in the next year's issue of the North Carolina Literary Review.
An excerpt from K. S. Crawford's historical novel, Keowee, was published in Wilderness House Literary Review, No. 5, Vol. 4 (www.whlreview.com).
NCWN member Mary Lambeth Moore has published her first novel, Sleeping with Patty Hearst (www.sleepingwithpattyhearst.com), with Tigress Publishing. Lee Smith says "I got completely swept up ... Moore is a natural storyteller with a great story to tell in this novel." Mary, a native of Reidsville, NC who now lives in Raleigh, has been a member of the NCWN since our beginning.
NCWN member Bill Cissna's second full-length play script, All About Faith, will have a public stage reading on January 28 at Theatre Alliance, Winston-Salem. His short script, Communication Gap, will be one of 10 produced in Evening of Short Plays #24 at the Greensboro Cultural Center, February 10-13.
Rebecca Clay Haynes published her first short story, As She Lay Dying, in the Fall 2010 Edition of The Binnacle, published by the University of Maine. (Unfortunately, the issue is not yet posted online, but the print version is available.)
. to Linda Beatrice Brown. Her novel Black Angels has been honored as one of the Best of the Best Books of the Year 2009 by the Chicago Public Library. The notice reads: "The Chicago Public Library selects books that meet high standards of writing and illustration and that have a significant curriculum link. The Best of the Best list is presented in workshops to hundreds of public and school librarians from across Chicago, distributed to bookstores and put into wide release in the Chicago media." Brown is the Willa B. Player Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Bennett College in Greensboro, NC. Black Angels is published by Penguin Putnam; you can learn more at www.lindabeatricebrown.com.
Hat's Off to Joey Olschner and his poem, "The Long Horn" which is now online at The Dead Mule. This is his first and only epic which attempts its own Homeric Journey through the Carolina tapestry of time and space. More of his work may be seen and experienced at his blog, http://oceanjoe.wordpress.com/.
The heart of the North Carolina Writers' Network beats in response to the needs and requests of its members. Its members are the poets, novelists, essayists, writers of short stories, flash fiction, nonfiction, novellas—all the vibrantly talented wordsmiths we have, who live and work across our state, from the western tip of our Blue Ridge Mountains to the wide, sandy beaches of our eastern shores.What does the NCWN mean to me, personally? Let me set the scene …Timing is just about everything. Well, it certainly was on the day I received the worst critique of my life. I'm sure you know the type: learned author reads your sentences aloud. Shakes his head, disgusted. Your BP ramps up like you've just run the mile. You wait for his feedback and pray it won't slice you to red-ribbon shreds. It shoots out like poison arrows from his lips: "I don't know, Jan. Maybe you should think about going back to school." (Insert shower scene from Psycho here; he is killing you.)Time moved at glacial speeds for me after that day. I did not write for six months. My bruised heart thumped erratically. I cried at the oddest intervals, and I was making my spouse sick. One day, the Hubs said, "Dear, you have got to do something different."Of course, I gave him the stink eye because his timing seemed to suck. In truth though, it was perfect. Online, I input my membership data to the NCWN's user-friendly Web site and rediscovered such delicious entrees as their guide to literary agents, calendar of upcoming events, Hats Off, resource links, and writing competitions. In the dessert section, Submit It, I read the call for submissions by a well-known publisher in Winston-Salem.The deadline for their Open Awards was a few months off, so I decided to enter. What'd I have to loose? Soon, my computer and I were back on track. I wrote every day for the next six months and submitted everything I'd written to Press 53. One of my pieces earned a spot on the finalist list (2008), and I floated to cloud nine and back. I felt a whole lot smarter about the timing of things, not to mention, clearer on the fundamental definition of who my community needed to be. By the way, my novella, Hard Times and Happenstance, won first place honors in the 2009 Press 53 Open Awards Anthology and will be published this fall.So, what does the NCWN mean to me personally? It is where my tender fellow writers and poets—the ones who speak in special tongues, the ones who shape-shift the world into a place we can actually bear (or stop putting up with) come together—online or at a conference, at a reading or via phone. It is where we can be counted and a place we can feel at home. The North Carolina Writers' Network is my community. Together, we make the best of good times better.So, dear, if you're not a member already, do something different today. Join. You'll thank yourself tomorrow for the good timing you had today. See you, Jan.
"Writing the New South is a brilliant, exciting, and NECESSARY project---sign me up, count me in! The 'New South' is a cauldron of change, a fertile field of art, a proving ground for new possibilities. I can't wait to see what everyone has to say, and in what genres. This is a real opportunity for us all to deepen our understanding of where we live, who we are, and what we believe in." --Lee Smith
"Writing the New South is a brilliant, exciting, and NECESSARY project---sign me up, count me in! The 'New South' is a cauldron of change, a fertile field of art, a proving ground for new possibilities. I can't wait to see what everyone has to say, and in what genres. This is a real opportunity for us all to deepen our understanding of where we live, who we are, and what we believe in."
Like it or not, North Carolinians are living in momentous times.
The state is home to two of the world's largest military bases, as wars continue in Iraq and Afghanistan. The state was home to two of the nation's largest banks, until one was sold to keep it from collapsing. The state once known as a bulwark for Republican presidential candidates voted Democratic in a record-setting election.
A state long known for explosive growth is in danger of losing jobs and population. A state long Red turned Blue, and elected its first female governor.
While no one can predict what will happen, every North Carolinian can and should record what has happened, and how it felt as it happened – especially North Carolina's writers. It has been said that one cannot spit in North Carolina without hitting a writer. Here is an opportunity for all those writers to do something for the people of this state, something that can provide understanding and perhaps even comfort during these tumultuous times.
With the coming of the New Year, the North Carolina Writers' Network will launch a program called "Writing the New South," offering its members a platform to record and share their experiences and interpretations of living in North Carolina as North Carolina changes dramatically.
"Whether they do so through essays, short stories, poetry, or even letters or journals, we want our members to grapple with what's going on in the state and in the world," Ed Southern, executive director of the North Carolina Writers' Network, said. "We are North Carolina writers living in a historic moment for North Carolina. We need to be writing about what's happening around us, to us, to our families and friends and neighbors."
The Network has created a special section on its website – http://www.ncwriters.org/features/writing-the-new-south - for submissions to Writing the New South. Network members can upload their poems, stories, essays, or other submissions. Each submission will be reviewed by qualified editors, and the best of the submissions will be displayed online. The Network is also in discussions to have the submissions compiled and published in book form.
"We're looking for submissions, in whatever genre, that will approach the world around us with imagination, depth, and responsibility," Southern said.
The first Writing the New South work, by award-winning novelist (and Network member) Lee Smith, is a "postcard" from Hillsborough, where Smith lives.
"Writing the New South is a brilliant, exciting, and necessary project … The 'New South' is a cauldron of change, a fertile field of art, a proving ground for new possibilities," Smith said. "I can't wait to see what everyone has to say, and in what genres. This is a real opportunity for us all to deepen our understanding of where we live, who we are, and what we believe in."
Southern said, "In the tradition of the New Deal-era WPA Writers' Project, the goal of Writing the New South is to show the essential and public value of our writers, while creating a record of, and a frame for understanding, our times."
- Authors must be current members of the North Carolina Writers' Network.
- Submissions must be no longer than 5,000 words.
- Submissions may be in any genre: fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, drama, journalism, etc.
- Submissions must deal with one (or both) of two themes:
1. Current or recent events of historical significance (for example: gas shortage of fall 2008, 2008 election, 2008 financial crisis, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc.) as they relate to life in present-day North Carolina;
2. Snapshots of life in a particular city or region of North Carolina, in 500 words or less.
- Submissions do not have to be objective; however, submissions may not proselytize or attempt to convert readers to any particular viewpoint, political affiliation, or religion.
- Submissions must be original and unpublished.
- The Network reserves the right to reject any submission.
- Accepted submissions will be considered for publication in a possible anthology. By submitting their work to Writing the New South, authors agree to execute whatever steps are necessary in the event that their work is selected for such an anthology.
About the North Carolina Writers' Network
Founded in 1985, the nonprofit North Carolina Writers' Network is one of the largest statewide literary arts organization in the country. The mission of the North Carolina Writers' Network is to connect, promote, and lead emerging writers and established writers through workshops, conferences, and other programs and services. The Network builds audiences for literature, advocates for the literary arts and for literacy, and provides information and support services for writers of all kinds and at all levels.
Prominent southern food writers, cookbook authors and culinary instructors will gather to share favorite stories and insights into food traditions of the South February 15 in Chapel Hill. The public is invited.
The North Carolina Writers' Network is sponsoring the event, which will also include live bluegrass music and southern dishes.
Tickets are $50, with proceeds going to support the work of the Writers' Network. Register here.
The panel discussion will be held from 5 p.m. until 7 p.m. at the Horace Williams House at 610 Rosemary St. in Chapel Hill. Speakers will include:
The panel will be moderated by diet and health columnist Suzanne Havala Hobbs.
The authors will be available to sign books sold at the event.
Tickets are available at Market Street Books in Southern Village, Chapel Hill; by calling (919) 251-9140; or by visiting the North Carolina Writers' Network online at http://www.ncwriters.org/.
Discounted annual membership rates are available at the event to first-time NCWN members for $55, or $20 off the regular rate.
The nonprofit North Carolina Writers' Network is our state's oldest and largest literary arts services organization devoted to writers at all stages of development.
For additional information, visit http://www.ncwriters.org/.