This year's Distinguished poets will be: Rick Chess for western region, Ann Deagon for the central region, and Michael White for the eastern region. Good luck to everyone this year!!

The North Carolina Poetry Society, and the committee for the western region’s Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet Series, are pleased to announce that the Distinguished Poet for the western region in 2012 is Richard Chess.  Professor Chess will work individually with three student poets and one adult poet from the region to strengthen their poetic work, a year culminating in various readings with some or all of the participating poets.  These readings will include one at Western Carolina University’s annual Literary Festival, as well as readings at area libraries.

Richard Chess is the author of three books of poetry, Third Temple (2007), Chair in the Desert (2000), and Tekiah (1994). His poems have appeared in many journals as well as several anthologies, including Bearing the Mystery: 25 Years of Image, Best American Spiritual Writing 2005, and Telling and Remembering: A Century of American-Jewish Poetry. He is a contributing writer to “Good Letters,” a blog published by Image: A Journal of Art, Faith, and Mystery.  An award winning and much-sought after teacher, he is the Roy Carroll Professor of Honors Arts and Sciences and Professor of Literature and Language at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. He directs UNCA’s Center for Jewish Studies and has been a member of the low-residency MFA faculties at Warren Wilson College and Queens College. He served for a number of years as writer-in-residence at the Brandeis Bardin Institute in Simi Valley, California. He also served as assistant director of The Jewish Arts Institute at Elat Chayyim, located at the Isabella Freedman Retreat Center, where he taught creative writing.

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Happy holidays to all!! I hope everyone has had an amazing year and will spend the next week celebrating and spending time with the people you love!

-Zach

Hey guys,

One of my old poems was recently published in Kid Spirit Online and I would love it if you took a minute to check it out!

Happy Holidays!

-Zach

http://kidspiritonline.com/2011/10/the-things-that-passed/

Happy October! I Hope everyone is getting their Halloween decorations out!

Ann Blocker Fleming Deagon, born in Birmingham in 1930, graduated magna cum laude from Birmingham-Southern in 1950 and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. In 1951 she received her MA in Greek from UNC-Chapel Hill, and her PhD in Latin in 1954. From 1953 to 1961 she and husband Donald worked with “Unto These Hills” in Cherokee, NC. After teaching at Furman University 1954-56 they joined Guilford College, Donald as head of Drama until his death in1985 and Ann retiring in 1992 as Hege Professor of Humanities and Writer in Residence. Their daughters Andrea and Ellen were born there and graduated from Guilford. Ann taught overseas in Naples,Athens, and London, and was visiting professor at Elon College and Kalamazoo College.

Her serious writing began in 1970, and in 1974 Carbon 14 was published by U. Mass. and Poetics South by Blair. Indian Summer came out from Unicorn in 1975, Women and Children First from Iron Mountain in 1976, and in 1978 Godine published There Is No Balm in Birmingham, reissued by St. Andrews in 1997. No Balm had won both the Brockman Book Award and the Oscar Arnold Young Award.

Ann edited “The Guilford Review” 1976-1984, and her NEA Literary Fellowship in 1982 enabled her to broaden the scope of Poetry Center Southeast, which was set up in 1980 to house readings, workshops, and conferences for the Greensboro Writers’ Club, students, and townspeople. Here plans were laid for the North Carolina Writers’ Network, for whose members Ann still does critiques. She also served as president of several literary organizations and did residencies at Bread Loaf, Yaddo, AtlanticCenter for the Arts, and Weymouth.

In the 80’s Ann turned to fiction: Winthrop College published The Flood Story as its chapbook award in 1981, Green River Press brought out her short story collectionHabitats in 1982, and in 1984 her novel The Diver’s Tomb came out from St. Martin’s. Water Mark Press’s Breakthrough Award in 1985 brought publication of her experimental prose work The Pentekontaetia. Donald Deagon died in 1985, and Ann’s last book The Polo Poems was published by U. Nebraska in 1990.

Now she began a new life as a wanderer, actor, and singer/songwriter. Her publications—some 200 in some 100 magazines and anthologies—had brought her invitations to read and run workshops in a total of 20 states, but now she began to travel more widely, not just to England, Italy and Greece: to India on a Fulbright Seminar; to Egypt and back to Greece with her daughter Andrea, mid-eastern dancer as well as classics professor; and to Germany, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Estonia, and Russia singing tenor with the Choral Society of Greensboro.

After retirement in 1992 she acted with various community theatres, worked in film in Wilmington and with independent film makers, and modeled with a local agency. For several years she performed with “The Wise Cracks,” a collective of disorderly elderly women. She continues to perform occasionally at coffee shops, bars, bookstores, churches, festivals, retirement homes, art galleries, etc. Her songs are equally diverse, ranging from blues to folk to country, from social commentary to passion to the frankly bawdy. She has to be careful what she sings where.

At 81 she finds herself sustained by family—now including three grandchildren—friends, and the wider community of the arts, which has honored her with the Fortner Award from St. Andrews, dedication of the North Carolina Poetry Society’s “Pinesong,” this weekend’s celebration of her life and work, and the future promise of naming her Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for 2011-2012.

Michael White was educated at the University of Missouri and the University of Utah, where he received his PhD. His most recent books are Palma Cathedral, which won the Colorado Prize, and Re-entry, which won the Vassar Miller Prize. His work has been published in magazines and anthologies such as The Paris Review, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, and The Best American Poetry. He has received numerous other awards for his work, including a NEA Fellowship as well as several fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

JOSEPH BATHANTI was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA. He has BA & MA degrees in English Literature from the University of Pittsburgh, as well as an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College. Bathanti came to North Carolina as a VISTA Volunteer in 1976 to work with prison inmates. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC.

Bathanti is the author of six books of poetry: Communion Partners; Anson County; The Feast of All Saints; 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; Land of Amnesia, from Press 53 in 2009; and, Restoring Sacred Art, from Star Cloud Press, winner of the 2010 Roanoke Chowan Prize, awarded annually by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association for best book of poetry in a given year.

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. They Changed the State: The Legacy of North Carolina’s Visiting Artists, 1971-1995, his book of nonfiction, was published in early 2007. His collection of short stories, The High Heart, winner of the 2006 Spokane Prize, was published by Eastern Washington University Press in Fall 2007.

Bathanti's poetry, fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Shenandoah, The Cincinnati Review, New Letters, The Progressive, Manhattan Poetry Review, The Nebraska Review, Carolina Quarterly, America, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Louisiana Literature, The Sun, North Dakota Quarterly, The Texas Review, California Quarterly, West Branch, Southern Humanities Review, South Dakota Review, Kentucky Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Southern Poetry Review, The Hollins Critic, Tar River Poetry, South Carolina Review and many others.

His one-act play, Afomo, won The Wachovia Playwrights Prize, The Playwrights Fund of North Carolina Prize and was produced by the Lab Theatre of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. He has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes in short fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction.

He is the recipient of Literature Fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council in 1994 (for poetry) and 2009 (for fiction); 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 Bruno Arcudi Literature Prize; the Ernest A Lynton Faculty Award for Professional Service and Academic Outreach; the Aniello Lauri Award for Creative Writing (in 2001 and 2007); the Linda Flowers Prize; the Sherwood Anderson Award; the Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Prize; the 2011 Donald Murray Prize and others.

http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/g/Gilbert,Marie.html