Russell Banks

Russell Banks grew up in a working-class world that has played a major role in shaping his writing. His titles include The Darling, Cloudsplitter, Affliction, The Sweet Hereafter, Searching for Survivors, Hamilton Stark, The New World, The Book of Jamaica, Trailerpark, Continental Drift, Success Stories, and Rule of the Bone. The Angel on the Roof is a collection of thirty years of Banks’ short fiction. His meditation on American history, entitled Amérique: Notre Histoire (translated by Pierre Furlan) was recently published in France. Two of his novels, Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter, were adapted into feature films which received widespread critical acclaim. The Darling (selected by The New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of 2004) is being adapted for Focus Features. It will be directed by Martin Scorsese and will star Cate Blanchett. Banks is currently working on the screenplay for Rule of the Bone.

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Joseph Bathanti

Joseph Bathanti is the author of four books of poetry: Communion Partners; Anson County; The Feast of All Saints; and This Metal, which was nominated for The National Book Award, and won the 1997 Oscar Arnold Young Award from The North Carolina Poetry Council for best book of poems by a North Carolina writer. His first novel, East Liberty, winner of the Carolina Novel Award, was published in 2001 by Banks Channel Books in Wilmington, NC. His latest novel, Coventry, winner of the 2006 Novello Literary Award, was published by Novello Festival Press in Charlotte, NC. His collection of short stories, The High Heart, winner of the 2007 Spokane Prize, was published by Eastern Washington University Press in Fall 2007. Bathanti is the recipient of a Literature Fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council; The Samuel Talmadge Ragan Award, presented annually for outstanding contributions to the Fine Arts of North Carolina over an extended period; a Fellowship from The Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry; the Sherwood Anderson Award, the 2007 Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Prize; and many other distinguished awards.

 

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Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy is the bestselling author of The Water is Wide, The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, The Prince of Tides, Beach Music and My Losing Season. His novels are populated with domineering fathers, southern belles of steel, and inexorable tragedy; all are elements the author is familiar with from his own life, and he has drawn on them to create unforgettable books. Conroy, who claims he was “raised by Scarlett O’Hara,” has most of his novels transformed into successful screenplays. Pat Conroy's many literary awards include the Georgia Governor's Award for Arts (1978), the Southern Regional Council's Lillian Smith Award for fiction (1981) and the Georgia Commission on the Holocaust's Humanitarian Award (1996).

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Dagoberto Gilb

Mexican-American author Dagoberto Gilb spent 16 years making his living as a construction worker before winning wide acclaim for his first story collection, The Magic of Blood, for which he received the PEN/Hemingway Award and was a PEN/Faulkner finalist. He is also author of The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His latest short story collection is Woodcuts of Women (Grove, 2001). His newest novel, The Flowers (2008), relates the initiation story of fifteen-year-old Sonny Bravo. Mr. Gilb was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Writers’ Award. His essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The Best American Essays, and as commentaries on NPR’s Fresh Air. His book of criticism, Gritos (2003), from which “Me Macho, You Jane” is taken, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Currently, he is a tenured professor in the Creative Writing Program at Texas State University, in San Marcos, Texas.

Thomas Lux

Thomas Lux’s many books of poetry include The Cradle Place; The Street of Clocks; New and Selected Poems, 1975-1995, which was a finalist for the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The Blind Swimmer: Selected Early Poems, 1970-1975; Split Horizon, for which he received the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Pecked to Death by Swans; A Boat in the Forest; The Drowned River: New Poems; Half Promised Land; Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy; Massachusetts; Like a Wide Anvil from the Moon the Light; Sunday; Madrigal on the Way Home; The Glassblower's Breath; Memory's Handgrenade; and The Land Sighted. Thomas Lux also has edited The Sanity of Earth and Grass (1994, with Jane Cooper and Sylvia Winner) and has translated Versions of Campana. He has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry and has received three National Endowment for the Arts grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

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Lee Smith

Growing up in the Appalachian Mountains of southwestern Virginia, nine-year-old Lee Smith was already writing--and selling, for a nickel apiece--stories about her neighbors in the coal boomtown of Grundy and the nearby isolated "hollers." In 1968, she published her first novel, The Last Day the Dog Bushes Bloomed. Since 1968, her many novels and collections have won eight major writing awards. These include Fancy Strut; Black Mountain Breakdown; her first collection of short stories, Cakewalk; Oral History, a Book-of-the-Month Club featured selection; Family Linen; Fair and Tender Ladies; Me and My Baby View the Eclipse, her second book of short stories; The Devil's Dream; Saving Grace; The Christmas Letters; News of the Spirit, a collection of stories and novellas; The Last Girls; and On Agate Hill. Lee Smith is Western North Carolina’s Together We Read selection for 2007-8.

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Gloria Vando

Gloria Vando is publisher /editor of Helicon Nine Editions, a nonprofit literary press she founded in 1977. Her book of poems, Shadows and Supposes, won the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award and was named the Best Poetry Book of 2003 by the Latino Hall of Fame. Her first poetry book, Promesas: Geography of the Impossible, a personal encounter with the history of colonialism and her family roots in Puerto Rico, was a Walt Whitman finalist and won the 1994 Thorpe Menn Book Award. She has also received a poetry fellowship from the Kansas Arts Commission, the Governor’s Arts Award (KS), a River Styx International Poetry Prize, two Billee Murray Denny Poetry Prizes, and a CCLM Editors Grant. Her poems have appeared in magazines, anthologies, texts, and on the Grammy-nominated CD set, Poetry on Record: 98 Poets Read Their Work, 1888-2006. She is co-founder of The Writers Place, a literary center in Kansas City, is a contributing editor of The North American Review, and is on the advisory board of BkMk Press.

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Carolyn Beard Whitlow

Recipient of a 2001, 2002, and 2007 Yaddo Residency, and a Cave Canem Fellow, Carolyn Beard Whitlow, Charles A. Dana Professor of English at Guilford College in Greensboro, NC, teaches Creative Writing and African-American Literature. Finalist for the 1991 Barnard New Women Poets Prize, and the 2005 Ohio State University Poetry Prize, she wrote her first poem at 30 years old while a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University. Subsequently, she completed the M.F.A. at Brown University, where she won the Rose Low Rome Memorial Prize in Poetry, and was named Phi Beta Kappa Poet in 1989. Lost Roads published her first collection of poems, Wild Meat, in 1986. Her poems have appeared in journals such as African American Review, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Indiana Review, 13th Moon, and others. Her poetry and essays have been anthologized in many works including A Formal Feeling Comes: Contemporary Poems in Traditional Forms by Women (1994); After New Formalism: Poets on Form, Narrative, and Tradition (1999); American Diaspora: Poetry of Displacement (2001); and Gathering Ground (2006). She was selected as one of ten North Carolina poets to appear on the 1997 PBS series “Poetry Live” hosted by Charles Kuralt. Her most recent collection of poems, Vanished, won the 2006 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award. Whitlow is also a visual artist and quilter whose work can be found at http://colorquiltsbycarolyn.squarespace.com/.

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Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poets

Cathy Smith Bowers, Distinguished Poet for the western region, presents emerging poets Caleb Beissert, Haley Jones, and Tom Lambert. The Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet Series supports the mission of the North Carolina Poetry Society to foster the reading, writing, and enjoyment of poetry across the state. Three Distinguished Poets, one each from the east, central, and west of North Carolina, mentor a middle-school, a high-school, and a college or university student. For more information, see the North Carolina Poetry Society web site.