The Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site is located on 264 acres in western North Carolina. Carl Sandburg, of course, was a Pulitzer-Prize winning author and poet who made his home in Flat Rock for nearly twenty-five years.
The park’s vast historical and cultural resources include pastures, ponds, small mountains, hiking trails, and fifty structures, including the Sandburg’s residence and goat barn. (He raised prize-winning goats.) The park is open seven days a week, and offers one of the biggest archival collections in the Southeast.
It also offers a Writer-in-Residence Program.
The program is open to emerging poets in the United States who are at least twenty-one years old and not enrolled in a degree program, either graduate or undergraduate, during the residence, which runs annually in April. The poet receives a total stipend of $1,500 and contributes up to ten hours a week in community outreach (30 total hours). The writer receives a 15 percent discount in the park’s bookstore, as well as lodging, utilities, and two stipends. He or she is responsible for their own transportation and meals. Two pre-scheduled outreach programs include attending the historic site’s annual Student Poetry Contest reception honoring young writers in the region, and attending an open mic community program which serves as an introduction of the poet to the local literary community.
The 2016 Writer-in-Residence is Kimberly Simms. Hailing from Marietta, SC, sixty of her poems have been published in numerous journals and collections including Poem, The South Carolina Review, The Asheville Poetry Review, The Blue Collar Review, and The Millennium Sampler of SC Poetry, among other journals, anthologies and magazines. Simms has a Master’s degree in English from Clemson University with a Creative Writing Thesis, as well as a BA in English from Furman University.
The Writer-in-Residence program seeks to foster professional development opportunities to writers by:
- facilitating community involvement and outreach efforts for resident writer with broad and diverse audiences based on both community needs and resident’s needs.
- providing a workspace and accommodation in a listed National Historic Landmark house in the park on inspirational grounds
- promoting the resident writer and her/his work, especially in the area media, with possible news stories, interviews, and web-page features.
- To ensure archival documentation of program
Carl Sandburg will be posthumously inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame on Sunday, October 16, at 2:00 pm, at the Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities in Southern Pines. The ceremony is free and open to the public: www.nclhof.org.
For more information about the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site Writer-in-Residence program, and to apply, click here.