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Finding their
inspiration everywhere from Landrum's northern mountain views to the
southernmost streets of rural Woodruff, two dozen poets present Spartanburg's
definitive poetic landscape in Still Home: The Essential Poetry of Spartanburg,
a new book by the Hub City Writers Project, edited by Rachel Harkai. Still Home will be released Thursday,
March 20, at a special event to be held from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. in the Showroom
at Hub-Bub. Hub City also will unveil a website of audio
recordings of local poets and an accompanying Still Home Teacher's Guide. The event, which will feature short
readings by many of the poets, is free and open to the public.
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"Hub City has
created this book and website particularly with our Spartanburg County
high school students in mind," said Betsy Teter, executive director. "We have
an enormous number of published poets in Spartanburg,
and this is our effort to use their talents as a teaching opportunity for young
writers."
Still Home
is edited by Rachel Harkai, Hub
City's 2008
Writer-in-Residence and an emerging poet in her own right. Harkai, who formerly
hosted a literary talk show on WCBN-FM Ann Arbor, also has spent the last month
recording Spartanburg poets reading and
discussing their work for a new Hub
City web page.
The Still Home Teacher's Guide is written by
Edwin Epps, teacher of English at Spartanburg
High School.
With masterful
language and unfailing Southern sentiment, the poets of Still Home represent
the coming-of-age of a new generation of contemporary Southern writers,
channeling the natural beauty of the Carolina
landscape, and tackling the tragedies and comedies of everyday life.
Through sometimes
real and sometimes imagined visions of the past, the Still Home collection's exploration of the elements that define a
place condenses the cycles of natural history from their grander scope within
all of recorded time down to the everyday events of a single life. Here, these Spartanburg poets invite
us into their kitchens, their yards, and sometimes, even into the homes of the
unknowing next-door neighbor whose hanging blinds have been left ajar.
Still Home
is available in paperback $12 and is available at www.hubcity.org, Amazon.com, Barnes &
Noble and other outlets. The Teacher's Guide sells for $8.
Poets included in this anthology either live in or
come from Spartanburg
and are publishing their work in national or regional journals and books. Some
of them have won literary prizes. They include: Philip Belcher, Butler Brewton,
Elizabeth Cox, Louis Dischler, Elizabeth Drewry, Edwin Epps, Marcel Gauthier,
Aly Goodwin, Frances Hardy, Tom Johnson, Angela Kelly, John Lane, Gail McCullough, Mamie Morgan,
Rick Mulkey, Robert Mulkey, Kristopher Neely, Scott Neely, Jennie Neighbors,
Fred Parrish, Alex Richardson, Emily Smith, P.L. Thomas and Deno Trakas.
Still Home is designed by Emily L. Smith, Hub City's 2007 Writer-in-Residence who now heads the Publishing Laboratory at UNC-Wilmington.
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