The free, public event is organized by the N.C. Arts Council and the Friends of Weymouth.
Joining Chappell will be Durham essayist Charisse Coleman; Greensboro playwright June Guralnick; nonfiction writer Elaine Orr and novelist Peggy Payne, both of Raleigh; and Lexington poet Barbara Presnell.
Poet Laureate Fred Chappell has written 14 books of verse, two works of fiction, “I Am One of You Forever” (Louisiana State University Press) and “Brighten the Corner Where You Are” (St. Martin’s Press), two collections of short stories, two of criticism, and eight novels. His most recent publication is “Spring Garden: New and Collected Poems” (LSU Press). He has been awarded the Sir Raleigh Prize, the Best Foreign Book Prize from the L’Académie Française, the North Carolina Medal in Literature, and the Award in Literature from the National Academy of Arts and Letters. Chappell, who has been awarded the Yale University Library’s Bollingen Prize and the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry (presented by the Sewannee Review), lives in Greensboro, where he has taught in the English Department at UNC-G since 1964.
Charisse Coleman began her relationship with the personal essay in response to the murder of her brother in 1995. In the process of presenting her work to groups like the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, the N.C. Academy of Trial Lawyers, and the N.C. Central University School of Law, and engaging in nonfiction writing workshops across the country, she produced a book-length memoir, “Dark Is a Way and Light Is a Place.” She is the recipient of the Ragsdale Foundation’s Fellowship award (1998) and “Authorlink!”, the International New Authors Award (1998), and was the winner of the National Writers Union essay contest (1997).
June Guralnick, Theatre Artist-in-Residence at Rockingham Community College, began her artistic life as an actress and dancer in New York City. She received a bachelor’s degree in theater from S.U.N.Y. Buffalo and a master’s degree in theater from City College of New York in 1986, before serving as artistic director of the Women’s Ensemble Theatre and as an instructor at St. John’s University, John Jay College and Henry Street Settlement Arts for Living Program in New York City. The N.C. Carolina Arts Council named her Visiting Theatre Artist from 1988-1991 and the National Endowment for the Arts selected her as a Theatre Fellow in 1991. Author of eight plays, her current project, a trilogy, is anchored by the second work, “Finding Clara,” which interweaves the lives of North Carolina textile mill workers with that of silent movie star Clara Bow. Guralnick is at work on the playscript “Alice In Babylon,” a 1950’s tale of murder set against the backdrop of the Soviet Cold War era.
Elaine Orr, the daughter of Southern Baptist missionaries, grew-up in Ogbomosho, Nigeria. Her attempt to make sense of those years and to understand what it meant to be “a white, middle-class, American girl teen” is the subject of her two-part memoir, “Gods of Noonday: A White Girl’s African Life.” An associate professor of English at NCSU, Elaine Orr makes her home in Raleigh and is the author of two books, “Tillie Olsen and a Feminist Spiritual Vision” (University of Mississippi Press) and “Subject to Negotiation: Reading Feminist Criticism and American Women’s Fictions” (University Press of Virginia). She was nominated for her university’s CHASS Teaching Award (2000) and received its Provost’s Research Award (1995), and has twice been named honorable mention for the Academy of American Poets’ College Poetry Prize (1981 and 1982). The second volume of her memoir-in-progress is titled “Sleeping in Arkansas.”
Peggy Payne is a North Carolina native based in Apex. A longtime composer of promotional materials, brochures and reports for commercial and governmental agencies, she is the author of two novels, Sister India (Penguin Putnam) and Revelation (Simon & Schuster), which became a New York Times Book Review editor’s choice. Her essays have appeared in Family Circle, Writer’s Digest, Ms. Magazine, Travel & Leisure, Food & Wine and Science Digest, and in the New York Times, Washington Post, Miami Herald, Los Angeles Times and the Christian Science Monitor. She has written several nonfiction works including “The Healing Power of Doing Good,” with Allan Luks (Ballantine Books) and is currently polishing her novel-length manuscript, “Cobalt Blue.”
Barbara Presnell received both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in fine arts from UNC-G and a master’s degree in English from the University of Kentucky in 1987, and was an assistant professor of English at Catawba College, from 1995 to 2000. She is the author of two volumes of poetry, Snake Dreams (Nightshade Press) and “Unravelings” (Longleaf Press). Her collections received the N.C. Poetry Council’s best book of poetry award in 1994 and 1998, respectively. Presnell was the recipient of a Regional Artist Grant Award given by the N.C. Arts Council and the Arts Council of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County in 1998. She has just completed her third poetry collection, “What the Years Say” and has begun a new poetry project set in Galeano, Nuevo Leon, Mexico, “The Galeano Poems.”
For more information about the Poet Laureate Program and about literature programs at the N.C. Arts Council, call Kirsten Mullen at (919) 715-1519.
