Beloved teacher of writing and North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame inductee Doris Betts won three Sir Walter Raleigh awards, the Southern Book Award, the North Carolina Award for Literature, the John Dos Passos Prize, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Medal for the Short Story, among other recognitions. Among her many novels, Souls Raised from the Dead was on the New York Times’ list of top twenty best books in 1994.
She was also a native of Statesville.
This weekend, Thursday, March 24 – Saturday, March 26, Mitchell Community College will hold the fourth annual Doris Betts Spring Literary Festival on the Statesville campus.
The 2016 visiting authors are Joyce Compton Brown (Friday, 3:15 pm), Robert Inman (Friday, 6:30 pm), Kevin Winchester (Saturday, 11:15 am), and Anjail R. Ahmad (Saturday, 1:30 pm). This event is free and open to the public.
Saturday will offer a writing workshop in concurrent sessions at 10:00 am, first-come, first-served. Please contact Kimberly Singh at ksingh@mitchellcc.edu or 704-978-1361 to register.
For a full schedule of events, click here.
Mitchell Community College has been educating residents of Iredell County and surrounding communities since it was chartered in 1852 as a Presbyterian college for women. Mitchell continued its evolution and in 1959 became an independent community college operated by the Mitchell College Foundation and recognized by the state. Mitchell opened one of North Carolina’s first early college (high school) programs in 2004 and added a second in 2008.Today’s Mitchell is preparing motivated high school students to excel by allowing them to earn college credit tuition-free through the Career and College Promise program and two early college high schools.