Happy trails to Marsha Warren who will retire as director of the Paul Green Foundation, effective January 1, 2021.
“I’ll very much miss helping carry on Paul Green’s life-long work in support of the arts and human rights,” Marsha said in an e-mail.
She has served the Paul Green Foundation for thirty years. In 2018, she was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. As the longtime Executive Director of the North Carolina Writers’ Network, Marsha helped to create a standard for excellence—the annual Fall Conference, the named competitions, the newsletter, and regional groups such as NCWN-West. She launched a writing program for prison inmates and created the Network’s critique service for writers at all stages of development. By building a truly open architecture based on strong relationships and generosity, Marsha Warren paved the way for the virtual capacity of the Network to keep us connected today.
She was the editor of The Collected Poems of Sam Ragan (St. Andrew’s University Press, 1990) and, together with NC Literary Hall of Fame inductee Ronald H. Bayes, edited the anthology North Carolina’s 400 Years: Signs along the Way (Acorn Press, 1986).
NCWN Trustee Georgann Eubanks will become the new executive director of the Paul Green Foundation.
Georgann is the author of the three-volume Literary Trails series commissioned by the NC Arts Council and published by UNC Press. Her latest book is The Month of their Ripening: North Carolina Heritage Foods Through the Year (UNC Press, 2018). Video documentaries include Earthcaster: The Life and Work of Thomas Sayre; Meinrad Craighead: Praying with Images;Â Coming Out Coming In: Faith, Identity, and Belonging (which won an Emmy for Best Topical Documentary in Midsouth Region); and several others. Georgann has won a number of awards, including the Leadership in the Arts Award, the Archie K. Davis Fellowship, the Sam Ragan Award, and an NC Arts Council Fellowship in fiction. She is the immediate past president of the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association and is a recent inductee to the North Caroliniana Society.
Georgann is currently at work on a biography of Paul Green. Along with her part-time work as Executive Director, she will continue to write, give talks, and do documentary work.
The Paul Green Foundation was established in 1982 to perpetuate the vision of playwright and activist Paul Green, whose commitment to the arts and human rights continues today through the mission of the Foundation. In 2007, the Paul Green Foundation established two funds at the Triangle Community Foundation and now gives the majority of its grants through these funds.
Author Paul Green (1894-1981), an inductee of the NC Literary Hall of Fame, was one of the South’s most revered writers, and one of America’s most distinguished. The first playwright from the South to gain national and international recognition, he was part of that remarkable generation of writers who first brought southern writing to the attention of the world. His best known achievements were as a playwright, including his 1927 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for In Abraham’s Bosom, his 1937 The Lost Colony (his first of 17 Symphonic Drama creations), and his 1941 stage play of Richard Wright’s Native Son. Equal to his literary influence has been his influence on human rights in the South and internationally.