Randy Mazie Releases Vol. II of "Itches Inside My Head"
NCWN-West member Randy Mazie has published the second volume of his book “Itches Inside My Head," which is now available on Amazon. The book is a collection of fun poems for everyone ages 3 to 103. It is available here.
Kerry Garvin left New York City in 2020 and now lives in Bryson City, North Carolina, after spending much of her childhood in the mountains. She's a published writer, editor, and professor. Her book, What Doesn’t Kill Her: Women’s Stories of Resilience, a collection of triumphant survival stories written by women, was published in 2021 and hailed by Gloria Steinem. Garvin and the book's co-editor, Elisabeth Sharp McKetta, sent out a call for true stories. Sixty brave women rose to the call, and What Doesn't Kill Her was born.
In 2020, Garvin graduated summa cum laude with a Dean’s Award of Achievement from Harvard University with a Master’s of Liberal Arts in Creative Writing and Literature. That year, she was Harvard University’s Thomas Small Prize Recipient, awarded annually at the university's commencement for both character and academic achievement. She had also earned her Bachelor’s of Liberal Arts with a concentration in Psychology and minor concentration in Creative Writing from Harvard in 2017.
Garvin co-founded Harridan and Strumpet Books, a women-author run publishing collective with a passion for progressive art that pushes established bounds and publishes voice-driven, high-quality books by a diverse array of writers. Learn more about her on her website.
Open mic readers are welcome to read poetry or prose for up to 4 minutes (2-poem maximum, please).
Those in the photo above met Saturday afternoon to celebrate the life of the late Dr. Gene Hirsch who was the founder of the writing program at the John C. Campbell Folk School in the early nineties. Because of his dedication to writing and writers, many poets, novelists, and creative nonfiction writers found their voices, and found the confidence and inspiration to write their stories in verse or in prose.
All of us present on Saturday told our story of how Gene influenced us. He was the most generous of people and taught poetry classes for free out of his cabin in Cherokee County NC.
He taught at the folk school every time he came down from his home in Pennsylvania where he worked as a geriatric doctor. Gene was a person who encouraged others. He never made anyone feel they were unworthy to call themselves poets and as a result so many people published their words that were found to be important to others.
I am especially grateful to Gene Hirsch because the writing program at the John Campbell Folk School was where most of my writing education took place. I did not study creative writing in college but was once told I had an equivalent of a master's degree right here from the best writers anywhere.
People like Valerie Nieman, Kathryn Byer, Darnell Arnoult, Steven Harvey, Carol Crawford, Nancy Simpson, and so many other wonderful teachers came to Brasstown NC, and taught us for a week and made a huge difference in our lives.
I took one or two week-long classes every year for ten years and then I taught at the folk school. Thank you, Gene. You never knew how many people you touched because you convinced the director and the board of the folk school to include the craft of writing in their schedule.
Thanks to Mary Ricketson for organizing this memorial to Gene.
Catherine Carter Will
Speak at Coffee With the Poets and Writers on August 10 at Moss Memorial Library
Catherine Carter, professor at Western Carolina University
Coffee with the Poets and Writers (CWPW) will feature poet Catherine Carter on Wednesday, August 10, at 10:30 A.M. at the Moss Memorial Library in Hayesville, N.C.
The event is free and open to the public. An open mic will follow the presentation. Bring a poem or short prose piece of about three minutes to participate. CWPW is sponsored by North Carolina Writers' Network West (NCWN-W), which also includes writers in Towns, Union, Fannin, and Rabun Counties in Georgia.
Raised on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Catherine Carter is now a professor of English at Western Carolina University. On a good day, she can roll a whitewater kayak and re-queen a beehive; on less good days, she collects stings, rock-rash, and multiple contusions.
Catherine also "enjoys cooking, especially vegetable and beans, because it's probably the original human art and it produces something everyone can enjoy; and I'd probably enjoy some kind of crafting if I weren't a complete clutz with my hands; I get Wordle most of the time but not always."
Catherine Carter’s collections of poetry with LSU Press include The Memory of Gills (2006) The Swamp Monster at Home (2012), and Larvae of the Nearest Stars (2019); she has one chapbook with Jacar Press, Marks of the Witch.
Her poetry has won the North Carolina Literary Review’s James Applewhite Prize, the North Carolina Literary and Historical Society’s Roanoke-Chowan Award, Jacar Press’ chapbook contest; it has also appeared in Orion, Poetry, Ecotone, RHINO, North American Review, Southern Humanities Review, Poetry South, Tar River Poetry, and Ploughshares, among others.
Coffee With the Poets and Writers will meet every second Wednesday from June until December 2022. Masks are optional.
Please do not park in the Book Store parking lot.
For more information, contact Joan Howard, joanhoward121@gmail.com
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| SCOTT OWENS, POET |
Members of Mountain Wordsmiths are honored to have as our featured reader distinguished poet and professor Scott Owens on Thursday morning, July 28, at 10:30 via Zoom.
Our monthly gathering, sponsored by the North Carolina Writers’ Network-West, will continue its online presence because local writers, as well as writers from other cities and states, are now joining us each month on Zoom.
Owens is the author of seventeen collections of poetry and a recipient of 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 newest
collection, Worlds Enough, is a collaboration with artist, MissyCleveland, and is his first written for children. His poems have been featured
in The Writer’s Almanac eight times, and his articles about writing
poetry have been used in Poet’s Market for several years.
Owens holds
degrees from Ohio University, UNC Charlotte, and UNC Greensboro. He is
Professor of Poetry at Lenoir Rhyne University and former editor of Wild
Goose Poetry Review and Southern Poetry Review. He owns and operates
Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse and Gallery and coordinates Poetry Hickory in
Hickory, NC.
NCWN-West is continuing to stay in touch by using technology to share our writing. We will offer writing events and writing classes online, while several other events are meeting face-to-face again. Many writers are enjoying the convenience and flexibility of Zoom meetings because of the ability to join our gatherings from other locations.
Those wishing to attend Mountain Wordsmiths may contact Carroll Taylor at vibiaperpetua@gmail.com to receive the Zoom link. We welcome those who would simply like to listen to the beauty of wordsmithing.
Carroll S. Taylor, Author
Chinaberry Summer
Chinaberry Summer: On the Other
Side
Feannag the Crow
Beneath the Sky and Waters
I am very pleased to be accepted for the anthology Kakalak 2022.
See the winners in poetry and art at:
https://moonshinereview.com/2022/07/21/kakalak-2022-announcing-winners-inclusion/
POETRY SELECTED FOR PUBLICATION
J. S. Absher, “The Place of the Blues in the Water and Carbon Cycles”
Laura White Alderson, “Oh That Billy Bumpus Lee”
Alexandra Aradas, “notes to ak freeland”
Pam Baggett, “To the Woman Who Told Me She Has Nothing in Common with Black People”
Don Ball, “Pocket-Dialing the Pandemic”
Richard Band, “On Tom Sawyer’s First Sight of Becky Thatcher”
Joan Barasovska, “Osage Avenue, Early Morning”
Sam Barbee, “DOA”
Michael Beadle, “The Gauntlet”
Glenda Council Beall, “If”
Libby Bernardin, “Self-portrait in a Red Dress”
Al Black, “Elysium Soccer Fields”
Teresa McLamb Blackmon, “The Hitchhiker”
Susan Blair, “The News Is Not New Anymore”
Gary Bolick, “A Country Heart”
Gay Boswell, “Rules”
Katie Ellen Bowers, “Most Mornings”
Cheryl Boyer, “Love, Simply”
Mary O’Keefe Brady, “How My Morning Goes”
Doris Thomas Browder, “Always She Moaned Her Own Bad Luck”
Joyce Compton Brown, “Forgive Me, I Just Bought a Refrigerator”
Les Brown, “Green Deserts”
Kathleen Calby, “Breakneck Creek”
Bill Caldwell, “Pluck”
Barbara Campbell, “What Really Mattered the Day the Ambulance Took You Away”
Paloma A. Capanna, “Sirens Over Ukraine”
Fran Cardwell, “Old Island Church Watch Night”
Mark Caskie, “Winter Rations”
Kenneth Chamlee, “What Falls Out”
S.L. Cockerille, “Take Jesus, for Example”
Joy Colter, “Ideation”
Barbara Conrad, “Who Has the Key to the Garden?”
Julie Ann Cook, “Massacre of the Innocents: An Art Class Study of Rubens’ Masterpiece”
Susan McClain Craig, “To the Living Statue”
Jane Mary Curran, “Funeral in March”
Steve Cushman, “This Is Not a Covid Poem”
Debra A. Daniel, “Revising My Mother’s Thirteenth Birthday”
John Desjarlais, “Our Fathers’ War”
David Dixon, “Holy Ground”
Mary Alice Dixon, “Snakeberry Mama”
J Dwight Donald, “A Native Son”
Deborah H. Doolittle, “In Connemara”
Sandra Dreis, “The Potato”
Joanne Durham, “Almost Morning”
Ralph Earle, “At a Pause in the Pandemic”
Nadine Ellsworth-Moran, “A Different Kind of String Theory”
Terri Kirby Erickson, “Cana”
Lynn Farmer, “Paid”
Nicole Farmer, “Exalted”
Michael Gaspeny, “Prince Memory”
Paige Gilchrist, “Weep Holes”
Ed Gold, “At the Wesley”
Terri Greco, “Sonnet After Gregory Orr”
Anne Waters Green, “On Viewing Behind the Myth of Benevolence”
Bill Griffin, “The Woman Who Fears She Has Lost Her Son”
Cordelia M. Hanemann, “Counting the Ways”
Janis Harrington, “Quarantine”
Sandra Sturtz Hauss, “Kensico—Last Day of Spring”
Peggy W. Heitmann, “Remedy”
Mary Hennessy, “A Praise Poem Without the Praise”
Ann Herlong-Bodman, “Deer in Shadows”
Jo Ann Hoffman, “At the Mouth of the Cave with Elijah”
Charles Israel, Jr., “Holy Sonnet 14”
Karen Luke Jackson, “Peeling at the Pale Green Line”
Becky Nicole James, “Cadillac”
Steph Jeffries, “Kindness, Served”
Kelly Jones, “starry night after the diagnosis”
Patricia A. Joslin, “Hiking the Blue Star”
Jeanne Julian, “Walk in Thaw”
Britt Kaufmann, “Rights County Appalachia”
Helga Kidder, “August Song”
Eugene Kusterer, “Encounter”
Dallas Lee, “Scuffing the Stones”
Susan Lefler, “If We Had Poets”
Greg Lobas, “Mother of Justice”
John Longbottom, “Drumbeat”
Kathryn Etters Lovatt, “She Is Not Herself”
Gina Malone, “Visitations”
Sandra Marshburn, “To My Students”
Mary E. Martin, “Caught”
Preston Martin, “George Cables and Cal and Eve”
Nancy Martin-Young, “ACME”
Katherine H. Maynard, “Bucking Hamlet’s Stars”
Terri McCord, “Decontaminating the Lake”
Marjorie Schratz McNamara, “Where We Are”
Ashley Memory, “Making Bread and Butter Pickles”
Yvette R. Murray, “Saturday Mornin’ in Washington Park”
Arlene Oraby, “My Black Beauty”
Alice Osborn, “Skirts in the Snow: Leaving the Donner Party”
Pattie Palmer-Baker, “Not Enough Love”
Aleta Payne, “Veritas”
Gail Peck, “Lunch Box from Hiroshima”
Gary Phillips, “Coyote”
Fred Pond, “Carolina Reaper in the Garden”
Gary V. Powell, “Dump Run”
Sarah Pross, “Gypsies”
David Radavich, “Loving Cleome”
Judith Cummings Reese, “Cassia”
Lucia Walton Robinson, “Picnic on James Whitcomb Riley’s Tomb, 1958”
Betty Ritz Rogers, “Gordon’s Ashes”
Marilyn Keith Rousseau, “Blood-Red Tomatoes”
Richard Rubin, “Passing”
Leslie M. Rupracht, “Aunt Barb’s Huckleberries”
Nasrollah Samiy, “Love Letters”
Diane Sasson, “Removal”
Roberta Schultz, “Deep Ends”
Martin Settle, “Die with Too Many Faces”
Jane Shlensky, “Ode to a Box Turtle”
Sherry Siddall, “Trading Path”
Michael Simpson, “For Edward R. Murrow”
H.R. Spencer, “Mahamari, a Haibun Sequence”
Caren Stuart, “Snake Harmer”
Nancy Swanson, “Savannah River Basin”
Lynne Santy Tanner, “My Phone Sends Me a Video of My Deceased Husband”
Jo Barbara Taylor, “Incunabulum”
Melinda Thomsen, “A Composition & Arrangement of Matter”
Lucinda Trew, “virgins widows and wives”
Rob Vance, “My Collection”
Mark Vogel, “Memo to Water Workers”
Priscilla Webster-Williams, “Photo of a Women’s Group in a Park, 1974”
Eric Weil, “A Generation-Counting Quilt”
Jennifer Weiss, “2020 Was the Worst Year”
Louise Gwathmey Weld, “Wild Night”
Nancy Harmon Womack, “The Seamstress”
Janice P. Wright, “We Apologize: A Poem 4 Our Youngins”
I marked the poets I know on this list, but all of them are excellent. I am proud to be chosen and look forward to reading the book.
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| Kenneth Chamlee |
Mountain Wordsmiths is honored to have as our featured reader, distinguished poet Kenneth Chamlee, on Thursday morning, May 26, at 10:30 via Zoom. Our monthly gathering, sponsored by the North Carolina Writers’ Network-West, is continuing its online presence because local writers, as well as writers from other states and cities, are joining us each month on Zoom.
Chamlee is a 2022 Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet
for the North Carolina Poetry Society. His poems have appeared in The
North Carolina Literary Review, The Greensboro Review, The Asheville Poetry
Review, Ekphrasis, and many other journals, including several editions
of Kakalak: An Anthology of Carolina Poets. He has two
contest-winning chapbooks, Absolute Faith (ByLine Press)
and Logic of the Lost (Longleaf Press), and has done
residencies with the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for Creative
Arts, and the Hambidge Center.
Chamlee has received three Pushcart Prize nominations and in 2017 was a finalist for the James Applewhite Poetry Prize. An Emeritus Professor of English at Brevard College, NC, he was the first director of the Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference, held annually in Brevard.
He holds a Ph.D. from the University of North
Carolina-Greensboro and teaches for the Great Smokies Writing Program of
UNC-Asheville. His new collection of poems, If Not These
Things, will be published in the fall of 2022. His poetic biography of
19th century American landscape painter Albert Bierstadt, The Best
Material for the Artist in the World, is forthcoming in 2023. Learn
more about him at www.kennethchamlee.com and @kenchamlee on
Twitter.
NCWN-West is continuing to stay in touch by using
technology to share our writing. We will offer writing events and
writing classes online until we can safely meet face-to-face again. Many
writers are enjoying the convenience and flexibility of Zoom meetings because
of the ability to join us from other locations.
Mountain Wordsmiths will continue its online presence. For those who enjoyed attending Coffee with the Poets and Writers which met at Moss Memorial Library, exciting news is coming soon!
Those wishing to attend Mountain Wordsmiths may contact Carroll Taylor at vibiaperpetua@gmail.com to receive the Zoom link. We welcome those who would simply like to listen to the beauty of wordsmithing.
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Poet and editor David Graham will be the featured guest for Writers’ Night Out on Friday evening, May 13, at 7:00 PM.
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| DAVID GRAHAM |
April is National Poetry Month, and Mountain Wordsmiths will celebrate the beauty and significance of poetry on Thursday morning, April 28, at 10:30 AM via Zoom.
Our monthly gathering sponsored by the North Carolina Writers’ Network-West is continuing its online presence because local writers, as well as writers from other states and cities, are joining us each month on Zoom.
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| Kathryn Stripling Byer |
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| Nancy Simpson |
Byer and Simpson mentored countless poets, both beginners and seasoned poets alike. Beall will read a selection of their poems as a tribute to their lasting legacy. In lieu of Open Mic, during the program, all attendees are encouraged to read a favorite poem or one they have written.
NCWN-West is continuing to stay in touch by using technology to share our writing. We will offer writing events and writing classes online until we can safely meet face-to-face again. Many writers are enjoying the convenience and flexibility of Zoom meetings because of our ability to include poets and writers from other locations.
We welcome those who were regulars at Coffee with the Poets and Writers that met at Moss Memorial Library. Those wishing to attend Mountain Wordsmiths may contact Carroll Taylor at vibiaperpetua@gmail.com to receive the Zoom link. We welcome those who would simply like to listen to the beauty of wordsmithing.
Written by Carroll S. Taylor
Scott Owen's books are available in several places and because he appeared on Writers' Night Out on Zoom, you didn't get to see his books and buy his books that evening.
Scott sent a listing of his new books and where you can purchase them.
