NC Poet Laureate Shelby Stephenson to Speak at UNCG October 8 at 4 pm

Who: North Carolina Poet Laureate Shelby Stephenson 
When: 4 p.m. on Thursday, October 8
Where: Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives Reading Room in Jackson Library at UNCG.  
The event is free and open to the public. A book signing will follow the program.

Shelby Stephenson, who was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2014, 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.”

Perhaps Margaret Maron, Stephenson’s cousin, described him best when she wrote the following, included in the program for his induction into the NC Literary Hall of Fame:
http://ncartseveryday.org/2015/02/my-cousin-shelby-stephenson/.
Educated at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, the 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.

Ed Southern, Executive Director of the North Carolina Writers Network, will introduce Mr. Stephenson.

Please contact Barry Miller at barry_miller@uncg.edu or 336-256-0112 at least one week prior to the event to request disability accommodations. In all situations, a good faith effort (up until the time of the event) will be made to provide accommodations.