Visiting Writers' Series

The Visiting Writers’ Series has been an integral part of the cultural life of North Carolina Wesleyan College since the 1960s. Each year, the College invites several writers to read from their work and meet with students. Recently, the Series has paid particular attention to writers from Eastern North Carolina or of the Black Mountain School. The Series is supported by the Eleanor Hoyt Smith Memorial Reading Fund.  Upcoming readings are posted in the College Events Calendar. For more information, contact Dr. James Bowers.

The Eleanor Hoyt Smith Memorial Reading: The family and friends of Eleanor Hoyt Smith wished to honor her memory by staging every other year a memorial reading as part of North Carolina Wesleyan’s Visiting Writers’ Series. Mrs. Smith, the mother of Professor Emeritus Leverett T. Smith, Jr., the Director of the Series between 1976 and 1992, spent the last seven years of her life as an informal member of the college community, interesting herself primarily in the college library and in the Visiting Writers’ Series.

2013 Eleanor Hoyt Smith Memorial Reading

Joseph Bathanti

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

7:00 p.m.

Carlton Board Room

The reading is free and open to the public. A signing and reception will follow.

Joseph Bathanti is North Carolina’s Seventh Poet laureate and a professor of creative writing at Appalachian State University where he is also Director of Writing in the Field Program and A Writer-In Residence. He has taught writing workshops in prisons for over three decades, and has published seven books of poetry, including This Metal (2012), Restoring Sacred Art (2010), and Land of Amnesia (2009), a book of short stories, The High Heart (2007), and two novels, Coventry (2006) and East Liberty (2001). He has received numerous honors,  including the 2012 Ragan-Rubin Award from the N.C. Teachers Association, The Linda Flowers Prize, and The Sherwood Anderson Award. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in Carolina Quarterly, Texas Review, California Quarterly, Cincinnati Poetry Review, the Connecticut Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, and New Letters.  For more Information Contact Professor James Bowers at Jbowers@ncwc.edu .