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.

"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.