WILSON, N.C. – The Barton College Creative Writing Symposium presents the fourth annual Emerging Writers Series on Monday, March 16, and Tuesday, March 17, in The Sam and Marjorie Ragan Writing Center on campus. The event is open to the public free of charge, and the community is invited to attend.
Dr. and Mrs. William M. Batchelor of Wilson have provided a four-year sponsorship for the Emerging Writers Series in the Department of English and Modern Languages that began in spring 2006. This annual gift brings new writers to campus to speak to students and members of the community and to encourage aspiring writers.
This year’s featured writers include Catherine Carter and Dan Albergotti. “That’s My Story” workshop, scheduled from 3 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. on Monday, will provide an opportunity for these emerging writers to discuss their lives, inspirations, influences and craft. An evening reading, featuring the writers’ work, is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. On Tuesday, from 9:30 a.m. – 11 a.m. is “Nuts and Bolts,” a workshop where the writers will talk about the practical, business, and technical aspects of writing and publishing.
Born on the eastern shore of Maryland in 1967, Carter now lives in Cullowhee with her husband near Western Carolina University, where she teaches in and coordinates the English education program. Her first book, “The Memory of Gills” (LSU, 2006) received the 2007 Roanoke-Chowan Award from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association. Her work also has appeared or is forthcoming in “Poetry,” “North Carolina Literary Review,” “Tar River Poetry Review,” “Cider Press Review,” and “Best American Poetry 2009,” among others, and has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. North Carolina Poet Laureate Kathryn Stripling Byer said, “The Memory of Gills is altogether an astonishing, seductive, and finally irresistible book of poems. Carter is a skillful, imaginative, and witty visionary . . . and her poems say what she knows with a zest and inventiveness that no reader will soon forget.”
Albergotti is the author of “The Boatloads” (BOA Editions, 2008), selected by Edward Hirsch as the winner of the 2007 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in “The Cincinnati Review,” “Shenandoah,” “The Southern Review,” “The Virginia Quarterly Review,” and other journals. In 2008, his poem “What They’re Doing” was selected for Pushcart Prize “XXXIII: Best of the Small Presses.” A graduate of the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and former poetry editor of “The Greensboro Review,” Albergotti currently teaches creative writing and literature courses and edits the online journal “Waccamaw” at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, S.C. Noted poet and critic Edward Hirsch, in his Foreword, writes, “Dan Albergotti’s first book, ‘The Boatloads,’ is filled with the spirit of mystery. It begins in wonder and ends in awe. Albergotti is a poet of deep conviction, a rare quality in our cynical times. He is a genuine seeker, a man on a spiritual quest, a stubborn questioner, and his poems are infused with the sense that the earth itself is sacred.”
This program has been planned in cooperation with the Department of English and Modern Languages and The Sam and Marjorie Ragan Writing Center. For additional information about this event, please contact Dr. Jim Clark, Elizabeth H. Jordan Endowed Chair for Southern Literature and the director of the Creative Writing Symposium, at 252-399-6450 or email: jclark@barton.edu.
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Questions? Please contact Kathy Daughety, director of public relations, at 252-399-6529 or email: kdaughety@barton.edu.