David Zucchino is a University of North Carolina alumnus, former lecturer at the school and inductee of the North Carolina Media & Journalism Hall of Fame. Now a contributing writer at The New York Times, he has covered wars and civil conflicts in more than three dozen countries and is a four-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for his reporting in Iraq, Lebanon, Africa and inner-city Philadelphia. He won his first Pulitzer Prize for his dispatches from apartheid South Africa and won his second Pulitzer Prize for his book, Wilmington’s Lie.

By the 1890s Wilmington NC was the largest city in the state and the shining example of a mixed race community. It was a bustling port city with an African American middle class and a government of Republicans and populists that included black aldermen, police officers and magistrates. There were successful black owned businesses and, an African American newspaper. But across the state and elsewhere in the South white supremacists were working to reverse the advances made by former slaves and their progeny.

On Nov. 11, 1898, armed white mobs swept the town, destroying black businesses and homes, killing at least 60 people, banishing “obnoxious” blacks and whites, and replacing everyone from mayor to postman with supremacists.

In Wilmington’s Lie, David Zucchino uses historical newspaper accounts, diaries, letters and official communications to create a gripping and compelling narrative that weaves together individual stories of hate and fear and brutality. Wilmington’s Lie is a dramatic and definitive account of a remarkable but forgotten chapter of American history recently recognized with the Pulitzer Prize.

Thomas Wolfe was a notable American novelist from the early 20th century. He first attended the University of North Carolina and then Harvard University before moving to New York City in 1923. It was there that he wrote his most popular work, Look Homeward, Angel (1929), an autobiographical piece centering on his alter ego, Eugene Gant. Wolfe followed with four novels over the following eight years and had more than 10 works published after his untimely death in 1938.

William Sydney Porter better known by his pen name O. Henry was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, and later moved to Texas in 1882. It was there that he met his wife, Athol Estes, with whom he had two children. In 1902, after the death of his wife, Porter moved to New York, where he soon remarried his childhood sweetheart Sarah (Sallie) Lindsey Coleman, whom he met again after revisiting his native state of North Carolina . But it was while he was in New York that Porter’s most intensive writing period occurred, with Porter writing 381 short stories.

O. Henry was a heavy drinker, and by 1908, his markedly deteriorating health affected his writing. In 1909, Sarah left him, and he died on June 5, 1910, of cirrhosis of the liver, complications of diabetes, and an enlarged heart. After funeral services in New York City, he was buried in the Riverside Cemetery in Asheville, North Carolina.

John Ehle led an extraordinary life of accomplishment, leaving marks on Winston-Salem that include leading the effort to start the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. The Governor’s School was also his brainchild, along with several other efforts championing the arts and education. Before all that, though, Ehle earned fame as a novelist, and to the rest of the world, that’s primarily how he’s likely to be remembered. He died in March, 2018, at the age of 92. During his lifetime, he wrote 17 books, both fiction and nonfiction, and is a member of the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame and is considered by some to be the father of Appalachian literature.

Shelby Stephenson is an American poet and the ninth North Carolina Poet Laureate. He earned his Bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, his Master’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh, and his Doctorate from the University of Wisconsin.

Lee Smith is a southern author who typically incorporates much of her background from the Southeastern United States in her works. Lee was born in Grundy, Virginia, a small coal-mining town in the Appalachian Mountains, less than 10 miles from the Kentucky border. However, she has mostly been associated with North Carolina. She has received writing awards, such as the O. Henry Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, and, in April 2013, was the first recipient of Mercer University’s Sidney Lanier Prize for Southern Literature.

Jill Collins McCorkle was born in Lumberton, North Carolina, she is an American short story writer and novelist. She graduated from University of North Carolina, where she studied with Max Steele, Lee Smith, and Louis D. Rubin. She also attended Hollins College with Lee Smith where she received her MA. She taught at Tufts University, University of North Carolina, Duke University, Harvard University and Bennington College. She teaches at North Carolina State University.

Clyde Edgerton, raised in the community of Bethesda, near Durham, NC, has published ten novels, a book of advice (Papadaddy’s Book for New Fathers) and a memoir (Solo, My Adventures in the Air). The Night Train, his tenth novel, was published by Little, Brown in 2011 and received multiple starred reviews. Three of his novels have been made into movies: Raney, Walking Across Egypt, and Killer Diller. Stage adaptations have been made from Raney, Walking Across Egypt, The Floatplane Notebooks, Killer Diller, Where Trouble Sleeps, Lunch at the Piccadilly, and The Bible Salesman. Edgerton’s short stories and essays have been published in New York Times Magazine, Best American Short Stories, Southern Review, Oxford American, Garden & Gun and other publications. Edgerton is also a musician and has performed with musicians including Jim Watson, Mike Craver, Jack King, and Matt Kendrick. Audio albums and CDs on which he has performed include most recently The Bible Salesman, music and story, with Mike Craver. Edgerton is the Thomas S. Kenan III professor of Creative Writing at UNC Wilmington. He lives in Wilmington, NC, with his wife, Kristina, and their children.

Allan Gurganus was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. He first trained as a painter, studying at the University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He served three years as a message decoder with the United States Navy during the Vietnam War, and began writing during his time on the USS Yorktown. He achieved the rank petty officer second class. Following military service, he graduated from Sarah Lawrence College where he studied with Grace Paley. He studied with John Cheever, John Irving and Stanley Elkin at the University of Iowa in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. It has been said that Cheever sold Gurganus’s short story “Minor Heroism” to The New Yorker without telling Gurganus beforehand. It was the first story The New Yorker had ever published about a gay character. Gurganus himself is a gay man. In addition to later teaching at both Sarah Lawrence and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has also taught at Stanford and Duke Universities.

Allan Gurganus’ best known work is his 1989 debut novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, which was on the New York Times Best Seller list for eight months. It won the Sue Kaufman Prize from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, and sold over four million copies. It was made into a CBS television play, with Cicely Tyson winning one of its four Emmy Awards as best supporting actress in the role of the freed slave Castalia. The novel was also adapted for a one-woman Broadway play, starring Ellen Burstyn, in 2003. Gurganus’ other works include White People a collection of short stories and novellas; Plays Well with Others, a novel; and The Practical Heart, a collection of four novellas.

Carl August Sandburg, poet, journalist, biographer, and folk song recitalist, was a national celebrity long identified with the Midwest when he moved to North Carolina in 1945 after purchasing the historic Connemara Farm at Flat Rock. After settling in North Carolina his most extensive publications were a huge panoramic novel Remembrance Rock (1948) and the autobiographical Always the Young Strangers, one of his best books.

Jim Wayne Miller was born in Leicester, North Carolina. He was raised with five brothers and sisters on a seventy-acre farm in North Turkey Creek, in Buncombe County, about fifteen miles west of Asheville.  He earned his Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University in German literature in 1965, completing a dissertation on the German poet Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. From 1960 to 1963, he published regularly in Vanderbilt’s literary magazine, Vagabond. By 1963, he had already joined the faculty at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, sixty miles north of Nashville. While at Vanderbilt he studied under Fugitive poet Donald Davidson. He was a Professor of German language and literature at Western Kentucky University for 33 years, in the faculty of the Department of Modern Languages and Intercultural Studies. Miller is best known as a poet. In his work, he is centrally concerned with the preservation of the Appalachian cultural heritage in the modern world. His writing reflects his own experiences in the mountain South. He invents the figure of the Brier as an Appalachian Everyman, a voice for those voiceless people who are struggling to maintain their connection to a meaningful past. In 1985 Western Kentucky University produced a thirty-minute documentary film on the life and poetry of Jim Wayne Miller. Called “I Have a Place: The Poetry of Jim Wayne Miller.” The film won a Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival. It was broadcast on PBS stations.

The first issues of The Black Mountain Review appeared in 1954 and were edited by Robert Creeley.

There were only seven issues of The Black Mountain Review published, as seen in the seven cover images above. Black Mountain Review began with the idea of a consistent design template with minimal differentiation, but by issue five Black Mountain artists took over, under the influence of John Cage and Franz Kline, they rejected the rigid cover structure, and issue 5, 6, and 7 are often mistaken for having missing or damaged covers, with paint, coffee stains and pencil-like notes. The covers shown above are original.

The 7th and last issue, the one with the black rectangle in the lower right cover – is known as the “Beat” issue because of its concentration of artists and poets who were and would become influential within the Beat movement. Among the seminal works & writers featured in this unprepossessing little volume: America by Allen Ginsberg; an excerpt from Naked Lunch by William Burroughs (the first time ever for Naked Lunch to appear in print); “Bottom: On Shakespeare (Part II)” by Louis Zukofsky; an excerpt from “October in the Railroad Earth” by Jack Kerouac; and, “Changes: 3” by Gary Snyder.

In September 1948, Charles Olson became a visiting professor at Black Mountain College, replacing longtime friend Edward Dahlberg for the academic year. There, he would work and study beside such artists as John Cage and Robert Creeley. He subsequently joined the permanent faculty at the invitation of the student body in 1951 and became rector shortly thereafter. While at Black Mountain, he had a second child, Charles Peter Olson, with one of his students, Betty Kaiser. Kaiser became his wife.

Despite financial difficulties and Olson’s eccentric administrative style, Black Mountain College continued to support work by Cage, Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Fielding Dawson, Cy Twombly, Jonathan Williams, Ed Dorn, Stan Brakhage and many other members of the 1950s American avant-garde throughout Olson’s rectorship.

At 6 feet 8 inches tall, Olson was described as “a bear of a man,” his stature possibly influencing the title of his Maximus work. Olson wrote copious personal letters and helped and encouraged many young writers. His transdisciplinary poetics were informed by a range of disparate and learned sources, including Mayan writing, Sumerian religion, classical mythology, Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy (as exemplified by Process and Reality [1929]) and cybernetics. Shortly before his death, he examined the possibility that Chinese and Indo-European languages derived from a common source.

When Black Mountain College closed in 1956, Olson oversaw the resolution of the institution’s debts over the next five years. Continuing his experimental lifestyle, Olson participated in early psilocybin experiments under the aegis of Timothy Leary in 1961.  

In January 1964, his wife Kaiser was killed by a drunk driver in a head-on automobile accident, a grieving Olson incorrectly theorized her death as a potential suicide because of her dissatisfaction with her life. Her death precipitated Olson into an existential mixture of extreme isolation, romantic longing, and frenzied work. Much of his life was marred by heavy smoking and drinking, and some drug use which contributed to his early death from liver cancer.  He died in 1970, two weeks past his fifty-ninth birthday, while in the process of completing The Maximus Poems.

Charles Olson was an exponent of Projective Verse, a method of writing poetry that does not confine the content of the poem (i.e., what the poet is writing about, trying to say, trying to convey) to traditional, rigid poetic forms or standards (i.e., relying on beats, stanzas, iambs, rhyme schemes, typographic standards).  Instead, “Projective Verse” makes the “breathing” of the reader and the poet the crucial measure of a poem.  In other words, the form a poem takes–literally, what you see on the page–is intentionally crafted in a way that encourages reading the poem at a certain pace, with specific points of emphasis and contrast naturally arising from the page both as one reads it, and as one sees it represented on the page. 

At the height of mid-20th Century communist paranoia, the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted a secret investigation into Black Mountain College. Students and faculty of the college have told stories of how troubling and ridiculous it was to see trenchcoat-wearing FBI agents sneaking around campus, only recently, the bureau declassified the investigation file at the request of the Carolina Public Press via the Freedom of Information Act. Now available for public viewing, the file elucidates the motives and methods behind the investigation.

Paraphrasing the college faculty, FBI agents stated that Black Mountain College faculty are “conducting a very unusual type of school, for example, a student may do nothing all day and in the middle of the night may decide he[sic] wants to paint or write, which he does, and he may call upon his teachers at this time for guidance. They advised that everything is left to the individual.” The overall liberal atmosphere of the college garnered much public attention, and aroused suspicion that the college was fostering communist sympathies.

According to Dorothea Rockburne, who studied painting at the time, students would play tricks on the FBI agents as minor acts of rebellion. As Rockburne stated, “They showed up all the time, and looked like something out of a grade-B movie. They always had trenchcoats on and you could spot them from over a mile away. And of course we put on an act for them – one of our favorite tricks was to not have shoes on in the middle of the winter, and crunch out a cigarette butt with our bare feet. It confirmed their worst opinions, and we did not answer any of their questions.”

Jonathan Williams,  an American poet, publisher, essayist, and photographer, is known as the founder of The Jargon Society, which has published poetry, experimental fiction, photography, and folk art since 1951 including works of the Black Mountain faculty and students. Williams was born in Asheville, North Carolina. He attended St. Albans School in Washington, and then Princeton University,before dropping out to pursue the arts. Williams studied painting with Karl Knaths at the Phillips Gallery in Washington DC, and engraving and graphic arts with Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17 in New York, followed by the Chicago Institute of Design. In 1951, he arrived at Black Mountain College to study photography with internationally distinguished photographer from the Chicago Institute of Design, Harry Callahan (see reference in “Atlanta Antiquarian” menu tab). At Black Mountain College, Williams met and was strongly influenced by the College’s rector, Charles Olson.

At Black Mountain College Williams became interested in the rebellious and experimental poems that came to be labeled “Beat” poetry. Drawing on a wide variety of subject matter—jokes, politics, and other topical themes, as well as universal ones, Williams called himself a “visual poet” and often illustrated his poems with pictures or cartoons.

His poetry derived from music and painting (including a series of poems written as spontaneous reactions to Mahler’s symphonies), from a concern for ecological sanity, and from a sense of social outrage.

Jonathan Williams’ publishing philosophy was to seek out writers, poets and photographers who pursued a singular path in their work and were under-recognized, outside of the mainstream, but deeply deserving of attention. Jargon books and publications were always beautifully designed and printed, expressing Williams’ unique aesthetic sensibility. He often paired artists, photographers and writers in a way previously unseen. There are 115 Jargon Society titles in the original series. A number of these are rare, valuable and highly sought after by collectors. Of the 115 original titles in the Jargon catalogue, approximately 85 are books and another 30 are broadsides, pamphlets and other publications.

Among Williams’ many honors were a Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry, numerous grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, honorary degrees, and the 1977 North Carolina Award in Fine Arts. Jonathan Williams below in a 1975 interview.

Poet Thomas Rain Crowe reads Who Shot John at The Spirit of Black Mountain College, a 75th anniversary celebration held September 25-27, 2008 at Lenoir-Rhyne University and the Hickory Museum of Art. This reading was part of “Remembering Jonathan Williams (1929-2008): A Tribute” honoring one of the original Black Mountain poets.

Thomas Rain Crowe is an internationally known poet, translator, editor, publisher, anthologist and recording artist and author of thirty books of original and translated works. During the 1970s he lived abroad in France, then returned to the U.S. to become editor of Beatitude magazine and press in San Francisco, and one of the “Baby Beats” where he was co-founder and Director of the San Francisco International Poetry Festival.

Thomas Rain Crowe lives in the Tuckasegee community of Jackson County in the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. His literary archives have been purchased by and are collected at the Duke University Special Collections Library in Durham, North Carolina. Other collections of his works reside at the University of North Carolina Asheville.

“An immensely gifted, exuberant, versatile writer who should be ranked among our important contemporary voices.” So spoke novelist William Styron about Fred Chappell, poet, novelist, essayist, and professor. The man who inspired this ebullient tribute was born in 1936 on a farm near Canton. An avid reader, he began writing science fiction in the eighth grade, poetry in the ninth. At Duke University, Chappell studied under acclaimed writing teacher William Blackburn and befriended other future literary headliners, including Reynolds Price, James Applewhite, and Anne Tyler. An editor asked if he’d be interested in writing a novel. Chappell reports, “I told him I was a poet and I wasn’t really sure that fiction was a worthy endeavor.” But he began writing fiction; and four novels later, Dagon won the best foreign book award from the Academie Française.

Archie Randolph Ammons (1926-2001) was born on February 18, on his family’s small farm near Whiteville and later moved to Chadburn. It was a hardscrabble life and growing up in the country during the Great Depression gave him, as one critic observed, “not only an intimate acquaintance with nature but also a keen sense of the precarious nature of existence.” His early years on a tobacco and cotton farm provided the pastoral setting for some of his most memorable work, as well as the inspiration for poems about mules, hog-killings, hunting, and farmlands.

Ammons started writing poetry during the long hours aboard a Navy destroyer escort in the South Pacific. After World War II, he attended Wake Forest University, where his interest in science would influence the unique diction of his poetical style. After a few months of graduate school, he became principal of Hatteras Elementary School and absorbed the sights and sounds of the Outer Banks for a year. He also worked jobs as a real estate salesman, an editor, and an executive in a glass manufacturing firm before he began teaching at Cornell University in 1964.

Ammons has been described as a major American poet in the tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Generally opting for free forms, he has been concerned with man’s relationship to nature, the problems of identity, permanence and change, and the processes of nature. 

Robert Morgan grew up in the Green River valley of western North Carolina, near Hendersonville, on a farm that has been in Morgan’s family since the 1700s. He decided to become a writer while studying engineering and applied mathematics at North Carolina State University, transferred to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to receive his degree in English, and later earned a master of fine arts degree from UNC Greensboro. Morgan has published more than twenty-five books of poetry and fiction, in addition to a 2007 biography of Daniel Boone.

His novel Gap Creek won the 2000 Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and was an Oprah’s Book Club selection.

The poems in Terroir build on his earlier work but reach out in several new directions, exploring memory, family narratives, the natural world of trees and forest animals, and the poetry of work. Terroir is a French term used to describe the environmental factors that affect a crop’s phenotype, including unique environment contexts, farming practices and a crop’s specific growth habitat.

Morgan’s poems draw on science and folklore, Native American history, and music. These elegantly written poems celebrate everything from the bonds of friendship and community to the fleeting sparkle of a drop of rain, discovering wonder in the local and familiar, the sacred in the everyday.

Reynolds Price (1933-2010) a one-time James B. Duke Professor of English at Duke University and a distinguished novelist, poet, dramatist and essayist, was the author of more than thirty books, including the novel Noble Norfleet (2002). Born in 1933 in Macon, North Carolina, Price attended public school and earned an A.B. summa cum laude from Duke University. He traveled to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar in 1955 to study English literature, returning to Duke after three years with a Bachelor’s of Literature degree.

In 1984 Mr. Price discovered that a thin eight-inch malignant tumor called an astrocytoma had wrapped itself around his spinal column just below the neck. Several operations and aggressive radiation therapy to neutralize what he called “the gray eel” left him paralyzed from the waist down.

Despite years of physical torment, Mr. Price entered into a remarkably fecund phase as a writer. “Previously I’d averaged a book every two years at least, so I was hardly a great tree sloth, but I’d always said truthfully that writing was hard for me, very hard, and now it’s not,” he told The Paris Review in 1991.

Hypnosis therapy, intended to relieve his pain, released a flood of childhood memories that Mr. Price funneled into “Clear Pictures” and “The Tongues of Angels” (1990), which was based on his time as a camp counselor in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Reynolds Price, whose novels and stories about ordinary people in rural North Carolina struggling to find their place in the world established him as one of the most important voices in modern Southern fiction, died on in Durham, N.C. in 2011. He was 77.

Ron Rash is a North Carolina author deep rooted in Southern Appalachia. He is a PEN/Faulkner finalist, two-time winner of the O. Henry Prize, and winner of the James Still Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He wrote three collections of poetry and two collections of short stories before transitioning to writing a series of critically acclaimed and award-winning novels.

His 2009 PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times best-selling novel, Serena, was made into a movie starring Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper and was listed as Amazon’s #2 Book of the Year at the time of publication. He has written three other prize-winning novels, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; three collections of poems; and three collections of stories, among them Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award.

Charles Frazier (born November 4, 1950) is an American novelist. He won the 1997 National Book Award for Fiction for Cold Mountain. Frazier was born in Asheville, North Carolina, grew up in Andrews and Franklin, North Carolina,and graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1973. He earned an M.A. from Appalachian State University in the mid-1970s, and received his Ph.D. in English from the University of South Carolina in 1986. Cold Mountain was his first novel, published in 1997 by Atlantic Monthly Press. It traces the journey of Inman, a wounded deserter from the Confederate army near the end of the American Civil War. It follows his harrowing journey from deserting the army to finding his way back to the woman he left behind, Ada, who waits for him, dealing with all kinds of hardships herself. The power of Ada and Inman’s love, and their dedication to reuniting, is the driving force of the novel, along with Frazier’s incorporation of historical context. The work is rich in the culture and sensibilities of the North Carolina mountains and is based on local history and stories handed down by Frazier’s father about Frazier’s great-great-uncle William Pinkney Inman.

“I write historical fiction about ordinary people confronted by extraordinary events…. I am interested in history not simply for its own sake, but as it sheds light on the problems and issues of today.” Charles Price

CHARLES F. PRICE descended on both sides of his family from some of the earliest settlers in the mountains of Western North Carolina. He is the author of 8 novels covering topics from the Crusades to the American Revolution to the Civil War and to the Wild West.  He is the winner of the 1999 Sir Walter Raleigh Award,  a list which includes fellow North Carolinians Reynolds Price (no relation), John Ehle, Ron Rash and Charles Frazier.  In 2006 he and his wife Ruth helped found the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival.  He has worked to improve communities by promoting economic development, social equality, and the arts to enhance the quality of life. Price died in May of 2019, he was 80 years old.

Born in Jackson, Mississippi and raised on the Mississippi delta, Diane McPhail is the author of The Abolitionist’s Daughter. She is a member of North Carolina Writers’ Network and the Historical Novel Society. She now lives in Highlands, North Carolina. Based on true events and rooted in family history, Diane C. McPhail’s debut novel upends stereotypes of the Civil War South with a rare depiction of Southern Abolitionism during the family and national crisis that the Civil War wrought. The book opens in Greensboro, Mississippi in the year 1859. A slave auction has been scheduled. A young woman is begging her father to prevent the slave from being separated from his family. Her father, a judge, is a staunch abolitionist. Despite the law, Judge Matthews educates his slaves and wants to set them free, even though laws prohibit him from doing so. Restricted by Mississippi’s stringent slave laws, her father does the only thing he can do legally. He purchases the slaves and their two children and brings them to live at his home.