Profiles & Essays

When Words Fall Away

My dad and I are pacing up and down the road in front of my parents’ house in Oak Island, North Carolina. I have my arm around his waist and a hand beneath his elbow as if I’m escorting him. We’re only moving as fast as his shuffling feet will allow, but I’m scared to let him go. I’m afraid that he might fall.

Ernest and Me

Ernest J. Gaines became my literary hero in 1997, when I was a sophomore creative writing major at the University of North Carolina–Asheville. I had purchased his story collection Bloodline at the bookstore one morning, and by that evening I had given myself over to the book so completely that each of the stories about rural life in Louisiana seemed as real to me as the Blue Ridge Mountains that loomed outside my dorm room window.

Red Clay & Jewels

To read the work of North Carolina Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green is to know exactly where her inspiration comes from. It comes from the red clay of Orange County, North Carolina, where a little girl leaves footprints in the dirt as she follows her grandmother down to the water’s edge, fishing pole in hand; it comes from the silence of held breath as parents hide their children beneath the pews of a darkened church while the Ku Klux Klan encircles the building…