Featured image for post: Barton’s Creative Writing Symposium to Feature John Lane and Catherine Woodard on January 16

Barton’s Creative Writing Symposium to Feature John Lane and Catherine Woodard on January 16

WILSON, N.C. — December 19, 2017 — Barton College is pleased to welcome John Lane and Catherine Woodard, both writers with local eastern North Carolina ties, as the featured speakers for the upcoming Creative Writing Symposium to be held on Tuesday, Jan. 16, at 7 p.m. The symposium will be held in The Sam and Marjorie Ragan Writing Center on the Barton campus. There is no charge for the event, and the community is encouraged to attend.

Lane is professor of English and environmental studies at Wofford College and director of Wofford’s Goodall Environmental Studies Center. He is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, and is currently doing research for a new book on his father’s family who hail from Stantonsburg.

His most recent books are “Coyote Settles the South” and “Anthropocene Blues,” a new collection of poems. Lane’s first novel “Fate Moreland’s Widow,” was published by the late Pat Conroy’s Story River Books in early 2015.

Lane has won numerous awards, including the 2001 Phillip D. Reed Memorial Award for Outstanding Writing on the Southern Environment by the Southern Environmental Law Center. In 2011, he won the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, and, in 2012, “Abandoned Quarry” won the SIBA (Southeastern Independent Booksellers Alliance) Poetry Book of the Year prize.

As an environmentalist, Lane was named the 2013 Water Conservationist of the Year by The South Carolina Wildlife Federation and the Clean Water Champion by Upstate Forever. In 2014, he was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors. He, with his wife, Betsy Teter, is one of the co-founders of Spartanburg’s Hub City Writers Project.

Woodard is the author of “Opening the Mouth of the Dead,” a story in poems published by lone goose press in two editions: paperback and limited edition book art. She currently makes her home in New York City, but she grew up in Kenly, which is the inspiration for the setting of the story.

A former journalist, Woodard chairs an advisory committee for the News Literacy Project. She helped return Poetry in Motion to the New York City subways and is a vice president of the Poetry Society of America. Her poems have appeared in literary journals, anthologies, and CNN online.

This event is sponsored by the School of Humanities and The Sam and Marjorie Ragan Writing Center at Barton College. For additional information about the Creative Writing Symposium, contact Dr. Jim Clark, dean of the School of Humanities and the Elizabeth H. Jordan Endowed Chair for Southern Literature, at 252-399-6450 or jclark@barton.edu.

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