2006 Inductees to the NC Literary Hall of Fame Announced The North Carolina Writers’ Network (NCWN) announces three Inductees for 2006 to The North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame, a biennial program begun in 1996. Past inductions have been held at the historic Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities, in Southern Pines, N.C., but this year the ceremony, free and open to the public, will be at the Sheraton Imperial Hotel in Durham on Friday, November 10, at 7:30 p.m. Please join us for an evening’s entertainment all North Carolinians can enjoy! To be honored are poet Gerald Barrax, poet and prose writer Fred Chappell, and journalist and mystery writer Elizabeth Daniels Squire. The Induction opens NCWN’s annual Fall Conference that 400-plus writers from beginners to published professionals are expected to attend. Acclaimed writers Kathryn Stripling Byer, North Carolina’s Poet Laureate; James Applewhite; Shelby Stephenson; Betty Adcock; Lenard Moore; and Margaret Maron will present. UNC-TV’s “Bookwatch” host, D.G. Martin, will emcee. Poet, teacher, and literary editor Gerald William Barrax (1933- ) earned his B.A. from Duquesne and M.A. from the U. of Pittsburgh. He was Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at NCSU from 1970 until his retirement in 1997; editor of Obsidian II: Black Literature in Review; and poetry editor for Callaloo, the premier African Diaspora literary journal. A major influence on young writers, Barrax has been anthologized in more than three dozen works. His noted book Leaning Against the Sun: Poems (1992) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Among his other awards are the Raleigh Medal of Arts (1993) and the Sam Ragan Award for Contribution to the Fine Arts. Fred Davis Chappell (1936- ), born in Canton, N.C., earned a B.A. in fiction writing and later an M.A. from Duke. Upon graduation in 1964, he went to teach English at UNC-Greensboro, retiring in 2004 after a long and distinguished career. Chappell is author of over forty books of poetry, fiction, and essays. He was Poet Laureate of North Carolina 1997-2002, and reviewed poetry for the Raleigh News & Observer, publishing his last column on June 25, 2006. One reviewer called him “truly a national treasure.” Both humorist and visionary, with a gifted eye for details of character, Fred writes poetry and fiction that has earned the following accolades: The North Carolina Award for Literature; Yale University Library’s Bollingen Prize in Poetry; France’s prestigious Prix de Meilleur des Livres Etrangers; and the T.S. Eliot Prize. “Anybody who knows anything about Southern writing,” Lee Smith said in 2005, “knows that Fred Chappell is our resident genius, our shining light.” Elizabeth Daniels Squire (1926-2001), reporter, philanthropist, nationally syndicated columnist, and mystery writer, was born in Raleigh, N.C., to Jonathan Daniels and Elizabeth Bridgers Daniels. She graduated from Vassar College, then became a reporter for the New York Times. Squire published fiction and non-fiction on palmistry, mail-order shopping, journalism heroes, and crime detection. Liz told a reporter, “My life has been interesting every minute, which is why I constantly steal bits of it to weave in with my fiction—like a flood or an encounter with a rattlesnake.” In 1994 she created the character of Peaches Dann, an absent-minded detective. An Agatha Award winner, Liz was working on her ninth mystery at the time of her death.
For more details, see www.ncwriters.org.
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