Beginnings

In May 1995 a trio of writers in Spartanburg, SC, began to talk in a downtown coffee shop about how they could help preserve a sense of place in their rapidly changing Southern city. What their community needed, they said, was a literary identity.

Modeling their organization after the Depression-era Federal Writers Project, they began to marshal the talents of writers across South Carolina to create a series of books characterized by a strong sense of place. They chose the name Hub City Writers Project because it both invoked Spartanburg's past as a 19th century railroad center and challenged them to make their hometown a center for literary arts.

From its beginning, Hub City's emphasis has been place-based literature that encourages readers to form a deeper connection with their home territory. With its first title, Hub City Anthology, the young press asked local authors to write about the experience of living in Spartanburg. That book sold out within six months and then was reprinted. Over the years, Hub City has published in a variety of genres, including fiction, personal essay, poetry, non-fiction, biography, humor, nature writing, children's literature, and historical.

Hub City was shepherded in its early days by Wofford College poet John Lane, journalists Betsy Teter and Gary Henderson, and photographer/graphic designer Mark Olencki; gradually the organization broadened its scope by publishing nearly 200 South Carolina writers, creating a 15-member board of directors, and attracting the financial support of hundreds of South Carolina residents and businesses. Hub City is now a program of HubCulture, a 501-c-3 organization, which also includes the arts initiative HUB-BUB.COM.

Our writers

Nearly 200 people have been published in the 32 Hub City books, including local writers and authors with national profiles. Our titles range from single-author poetry collections to broad community writing projects, such as Textile Town and When the Soldiers Came to Town.

Among the nationally recognized authors who have contributed work to Hub City books are Josephine Humphreys, Rosa Shand, Bret Lott, Fred Chappell, George Singleton, John Lane, Shelby Hearon, Dori Sanders and Frye Gaillard. Also: singer/songwriter Marshall Chapman, Southern historian David Carlton, horticulturalist Michael Dirr, and Nashville music writer Peter Cooper.

Hub City has published poetry books by award-winning Southern novelist Ron Rash (Eureka Milll) and by South Carolina poet laureate Marjory Wentworth (Noticing Eden). A fiction anthology, Inheritance: Selections from the South Carolina Fiction Project, is edited by novelist Janette Turner Hospital  A poetry anthology, Twenty: South Carolina Poetry Fellows, is edited by Kwame Dawes.

Spin-offs

The Hub City Writers Project burst onto the national radar in 1999 with a feature article in Orion Afield magazine, which was later picked up by Utne Reader (circulation 250,000). Other stories and mentions appeared in The New York Times, The Atlanta Constitution, Brightleaf and Ya'll magazines. As a result, calls began coming in from all over the United States from people who wanted to duplicate the Hub City model in their cities and towns, or to publish a book of place-based literature like Hub City Anthology.

Among the communities we initially helped in this effort are Fidalgo Island, WA, Beaufort, SC, Flagstaff, AZ, and Charlotte, NC, where the successful Novello Festival Press was founded in 2000 by Amy Rogers and Frye Gaillard. More recently, our model was used by a group called the Red Hills Writers Project in the Tallahassee area to publish the 2004 book Between Two Rivers: Stories from the Red Hills to the Gulf, edited by Susan Cerulean, Janisse Ray and Laura Newton. In 2006, one of our original Hub City writers, David Taylor, who relocated to his hometown in Texas, published Pride of Place: A Contemporary Anthology of Texas.