poetry

Poets John Burroughs and Beth Copeland will visit City Lights Bookstore on Saturday, November 2nd at 3 p.m. They will share poems from their recent collections. 

John Burroughs of Cleveland is the 2019-2021 Beat Poet Laureate for the state of Ohio. His latest book, Rattle and Numb: Selected and New Poems, 1992-2019, was published in August by Venetian Spider Press.

Beth Copeland was raised in Japan, India, and North Carolina. Her book, Traveling Through Glass, received the 1999 Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Award, and her poems have been published in numerous literary journals, including e: The Emily Dickinson Awards Anthology (2002 and 2003), Hunger Mountain, The Kerf, The Ledge, Main Street Rag, Margie, Phoebe: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Feminist Scholarship, and Rhino.

To reserve copies please call City Lights Bookstore in Sylva, NC at 828-586-9499.

Catherine Carter will visit City Lights Bookstore on Wednesday, November 13th at 6:30 p.m. She will read poems from her new collection, Larvae of the Nearest Stars. Her third collection begins and ends by confronting the necessity--and the promise--to bear witness to the world as it is, addressing how we can manage to love the world in the face of everything that makes doing so a challenge. The poems in this engaging and meditative collection are sometimes dark, often funny, but always surprising.
 

Catherine Carter is also the author of The Memory of Gills and The Swamp Monster at Home. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Orion, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere. She lives with her husband in Cullowhee, North Carolina, where she teaches at Western Carolina University.

Mary Ricketson will visit City Lights Bookstore on Saturday, November 16th at 3 p.m. She will read poems from Mississippi, The Story of Luke and Marian.  She will be joined by Cathrine Carter, author of Larvae of the Nearest Stars. Catherine will open up with a few poems of her own and then introduce Mary. 

 Mississippi, the Story of Luke and Marian, relates Mary’s family story in mostly narrative poems, from the perspective of racial tensions in troubled Mississippi, 1948-1969, and the parents who found a way through these tedious times.

North Carolina Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green will read from her work and take questions from the audience at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, October 30th, in the Blue Ridge Conference Room at Western Carolina University.  Her work is lively and accessible, both personal and universal.  

Jaki Shelton Green is the first African American and the third woman to be appointed as the North Carolina Poet Laureate. When he appointed her in 2018, Governor Cooper stated that "Jaki Shelton Green brings a deep appreciation of our state's diverse communities to her role as an ambassador of North Carolina literature. Jaki's appointment is a wonderful new chapter in North Carolina's rich literary history."

Jaki Shelton Green is the author of eight collections of poetry: Dead on Arrival, Masks, Conjure Blues, singing a tree into dance, Breath of the Song, published by Carolina Wren Press and Blair Publishers. Her other publications; Feeding the Light, I Want to Undie You are published by Jacar Press. Her poetry has been published in over eighty national and international anthologies and featured in magazines such as Essence and Ms. Magazine. 

Her collegiate and professional experiences include currently teaching Documentary Poetry at the Duke University Center for Documentary Studies and serving as Visiting Professor for the Carlow University MFA Program; Writer-in-Residence at Lenoir-Rhyne University; Teaching for Equity Fellow at Duke University; serving on the NC African America Cultural Heritage Commission; and a host of other positions from the regional to the international. She is the owner of SistaWRITE and co-partner with Dream Yourself Awake and Vertikal Creative Ventures providing writing retreats and travel excursions for women writers.

Her awards include the 2019 NC Humanities Council Caldwell Award, the 2019 American Academy of Poets Laureate Fellowship, 2014 induction into the NC Literary Hall of Fame Inductee, service as the Poet Laureate of the Piedmont, the 2007 Sam Ragan Award for Contributions to the Fine Arts of North Carolina, and the 2003 Carolina Award for Literature (the highest award the state can bestow for significant contributions in science, literature, fine arts, and public service). 

The Poet Laureate’s presentation is co-sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences, the Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity Programs, the Office of Intercultural Affairs, and the Department of English.  For more information, please contact the Department of English at (828) 227-3268 or Dr. Catherine Carter at 227-3931.

The exhibition career of Bea Nettles began in 1970 when her work was shown in “Photography Into Sculpture,” at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Recognition as an experimental photographic artist followed and her work has been featured in over two hundred exhibitions throughout the world. Nettles' work is found in history texts and has been regularly reviewed in the media. Over 26 public collections contain her work and she has received two National Endowment for the Arts Photography Fellowships and grants from the New York and Illinois State Arts Councils.

She has delivered lectures and workshops internationally and is widely recognized for her innovations in mixed media photography and photographic books.

On Saturday, August 10 at 3 p.m. she will be sharing her latest artists books of poetry created with surnames that she photographs in cemeteries. With these names that function as parts of speech, she has written about the seasons, American History, an interpretation of Dante's Inferno, a version of the myth of Persephone, and most recently three stories of women's lives.

Fred Chappell will visit City Lights Bookstore on Friday, August 2nd at 6:30 p.m. He will present his new poetry collection, As If It Were.  Inspired by ancient, modern, and contemporary writings, Fred Chappell's sprightly new collection of verse, As If It Were, presents tales, anecdotes, pointed stories, and aphorisms to spark the conscience of readers young and old. Playful and even zany, the humor in these poems pulls readers into a world filled with noble lions, crafty foxes, predacious wolves, longsuffering asses, and fashionable peacocks. Chappell illustrates how the fable offers a timeless form of wisdom, surprising us with revelations that challenge what we think we already know, along with fresh observations of daily experiences. With its informal, even nonchalant tone of address and lush, polished language, As If It Were endows homespun materials with alchemical insights.

Fred Chappell is the author of more than thirty volumes of poetry and prose. He has received the Bollingen Prize, the T. S. Eliot Award, and the Thomas Wolfe Prize. His fiction has been translated into more than a dozen languages and received the Best Foreign Book Award from the Académie Française. He was the poet laureate of North Carolina from 1997 to 2002.

Thomas Rain Crowe will visit City Lights Bookstore on Friday, May 31st at 6:30 p.m.  He will present the collected poems of Yvan Goll he edited titled, The Inner Trees.  Yvan Goll is one of the most important but neglected European writers of the 20th century Because he wrote in several languages and was not claimed by any country his work is not well known here. This book includes translations spanning sixty years which have been out of print for decades. The translators include Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Bly, W.S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell, William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Patchen, Paul Zweig, and Nan Watkins.

Thomas Rain Crowe is an internationally-published and recognized author and translator of more than thirty books, including the multi-award winning nonfiction nature memoir Zoro's Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods.

Swain county poet Benjamin Cutler will read from his debut collection on Saturday, June 1st at 6:30 p.m. Catherine Carter said of The Geese Who Might Be Gods, Ben Cutler’s first book of poems is rooted in a particular soil, or bone, of this world, the mountains and rivers of the southern Appalachians; but its branches and crowns stretch out to the hope of a post-apocalyptic tomato sandwich and back to Eden. Cutler’s imagination, like his vulture, is endlessly hungry, but it quivers, “lip-torn and breathless”, with empathy for and identification with everything it touches—bees, bats, children, god-geese whose necks write the letter S “for all their secrets.”  These are quirky, accessible poems full of the music of common language. The casual browser, in picking up this collection, need not fear being bullied or patronized—nothing too scary here, unless you count loneliness, death, the perils of love, or the end of the world. But it is in their setting that the poet’s perilous love for the world finds its context and its meaning. The Geese Who Might Be Gods will reward reading and re-reading with passage into a familiar world both rendered strange and seen anew, as on “the first day’s morning—// when everything first opened / and reached for the new light.”

Catherine Carter and Megan Lucas will also be on hand to read poems, prose and to introduce Benjamin. To reserve copies of The Geese Who Might Be Gods please call City Lights Bookstore in Sylva, NC at 828-586-9499.

Poetry Month Celebration

City Lights Bookstore will host four poets on Saturday, April 13th at 3 p.m. to celebrate National Poetry Month.

Dee Stribling writes poetry and prose primarily around rural landscape and culture. She is the current Poet Laureate of Hillsborough, N.C. Dee will be reading from her chapbooks, Just Down the Road and Appalachian Picture Book.

Kim Blum-Hyclak makes her home and her garden in Lancaster, SC, but her roots remain in Ohio. She writes an eclectic mix of poetry and prose, with grace and beauty being the common thread. Kim will be reading from her poetry book, In the Garden of Life and Death ~ A Mother and Daughter Walk.

Sue Dunlap lives in Walland, TN, in the foothills of the Southern Appalachians. She writes poetry and prose, mainly about the culture of her people. Sue will be reading from two collections of poetry: The Story Tender and Knead.

Laurie Wilcox-Meyer was born in Louisiana and now lives in Asheville, North Carolina.  While at Northwestern University and Florida State University she studied piano and music theory.  She worked as a counselor, facilitating parent-child communication and co-wrote a children’s book, Who’s Ms. Sand Dollar? A Visit With the School Counselor. Her chapbook, Circling Silence, was published in January 2018 by Finishing Line Press and her full-length book of poetry, Of Wilderness and Flight, FootHills Publishing, was published in March 2018. Laurie will be reading from two collections: Of Wilderness and Flight and Circling Silence.

To reserve copies of these books please call City Lights Bookstore in Sylva, NC at 828-586-9499.

Dana Wildsmith and Susan O’Dell Underwood will visit City Lights Bookstore on Saturday, May 25th at 3 p.m. They will read from their latest collections of poetry, One Light and The Book of Awe, respectively.

Dana Wildsmith is the author of a novel, Jumping, and an environmental memoir, Back to Abnormal: Surviving With An Old Farm in the New South, which was a finalist for Georgia Author of the Year. She is also the author of five collections of poetry. Wildsmith has served as Artist-in-Residence for Grand Canyon National Park and for Everglades National Park. She lives with her family on an old farm in north Georgia and works as an English literacy instructor at Lanier Technical College.

Susan O’Dell Underwood is currently a Professor of English and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Carson-Newman University. In addition to The Book of Awe she has published two chapbooks, From and Love and Other Hungers.