Kathryn Stripling Byer on “The State of Things” Today!

Listen today, Friday, October 12,  at 12:00 pm to WUNC 91.5 “The State of Things” with Frank Stasio to hear a feature on the upcoming North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame inductions and an interview with 2012 inductee Kathryn Stripling Byer.

Bestselling poet and memoirist Maya Angelou, former state Poet Laureate Kathryn Stripling Byer, and 18th-century explorer and naturalist John Lawson will be inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame this fall. The induction ceremony will be 2:00 pm, Sunday, October 14, at the Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities in Southern Pines, where the NCLHOF is housed. The ceremony is free and open to the public.

Kathryn Stripling Byer served as North Carolina’s Poet Laureate—the first woman to serve in that role—from 2005 to 2009. She has published six books of poetry, with a seventh due from the Louisiana State University Press this fall, and taught for many years at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee. Byer and her work have won the AWP Award, the Roanoke-Chowan Award, the Brockman-Campbell Award, the SIBA Book of the Year Award in poetry, fellowships from the National Endowment for Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Hanes Award in Poetry from the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

At the ceremony, Sally Buckner—herself a noted poet, editor, and advocate for North Carolina literature—will present Byer for induction. Bestselling novelist and fellow NCLHOF inductee Lee Smith will read Byer’s poem “Mountain Time.”

John Lawson will be presented for induction by noted nature writer Phillip Manning. Danny Bell, the Program Coordinator for the curriculum in American Indian Studies at UNC Chapel Hill, will read an excerpt from A New Voyage to Carolina. Kay Williams, the executive director of Tryon Palace in New Bern, will accept the induction on Lawson’s behalf.

Maya Angelou will not be able to attend. But Dr. Edwin G. Wilson, Provost Emeritus at Wake Forest University, will present Angelou for induction, and accept the induction on her behalf. Poet Jaki Shelton Green, the Triangle’s first Piedmont Laureate, will read Angelou’s poem “Still I Rise” in her honor.

For more information on the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame, visit www.nclhof.org.

To listen to “The State of Things” online via live stream, click here.