April Folk School Readings

April Folk School Readings

On Thursday, April 19, 2012 at 7:00 PM, John C. Campbell Folk School
and the NC Writers Network West are sponsoring a reading of poetry at Keith
House. The reading is free of charge and open to the public. Poets Nancy
Simpson and Maren Mitchell, both of Hayesville will be the featured readers.

Nancy Simpson

Nancy Simpson is the author of three poetry collections: Across Water, Night Student and most recently Living Above the Frost Line, New and Selected Poems (Carolina Wren Press, 2010). She also edited Echoes Across the Blue Ridge (anthology 2010). She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and a BS in Education from Western Carolina University. She received a NC Arts Fellowship and cofounded NC Writers Network West, a nonprofit, professional writing organization serving writers from the mountains west of Asheville and the Georgia mountains.

For more than 30 years, young writers have known her as “beloved teacher.” Simpson’s poems have been published in The Georgia Review, Southern Poetry Review, Seneca Review, New Virginia Review, Prairie Schooner and others. Her poems have been included in anthologies, Word and Wisdom, 100 Years of N.C. Poetry and Literary Trails of N.C. (2008). Her poems have also been featured in Southern Appalachian Poetry, a textbook anthology published at McFarland Press.

Nancy lives in Hayesville, NC. Through 2010 she served as Resident Writer at the John C. Campbell Folk School. Presently she teaches Poetry Writing at the Institute for Continued Learning at Young Harris College.

Maren Mitchell

Maren O Mitchell’s poems have appeared in Southern Humanities Review, The Classical
Outlook, The Journal of Kentucky Studies, Appalachian Journal, Red Clay Reader, Volume 4, The Richmond Broom, The Arts Journal, and the anthologies Sunrise from Blue Thunder, Echoes Across the Blue Ridge, and Nurturing Paws.

Poems are currently online and archived in Wild Goose Poetry Review and Pirene’s Fountain, and forthcoming in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume V: Georgia.
Maren has taught poetry at Blue Ridge Community College, Flat Rock, NC, and catalogued at the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site.
For over twenty years she has taught origami, the Japanese art of paper folding. A North Carolina native, she now lives in Young Harris, Georgia, with her husband and two cats.