LibraryVoicesSC

A Conversation with Sarah Blackman of Greenville's Fine Arts Center

Dr. Curtis Rogers discusses Greenville's Fine Arts Center and more with Sarah Blackman. Sarah is a poet, fiction, and creative nonfiction author originally from Washington D.C. She graduated from Washington College with a BA in English, a minor in Creative Writing, and earned her MFA from the University of Alabama. Her poetry and prose have been published in a number of journals and magazines, including The Gettysburg Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Conjunctions, Oxford American Magazine and The Missouri Review. Her debut collection of short fiction, Mother Box and Other Tales, won the FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize in 2012. And her most recent novel, Hex, came out in 2016.

Links:

• Fine Arts Center http://www.fineartscenter.net/
• Crashtest Magazine http://www.crashtestmag.com/

Poetry with Ed Madden, Columbia’s Poet Laureate – Episode 39

Dr. Curtis Rogers discusses poetry and more with Dr. Ed Madden, Columbia South Carolina’s first Poet Laureate. Dr. Madden is a poet, activist, professor of English and Director of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of Signals, which won the 2007 SC Poetry Book Prize and Prodigal: Variations; Nest; Ark, and he recently edited Theologies of Terrain by Tim Conroy. His chapbook My Father’s House was selected for the Seven Kitchens Press Editor’s Series and his poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2007, The Book of Irish American Poetry, and in journals such as Prairie Schooner, Crazyhorse, Poetry Ireland Review, Los Angeles Review, and online at The Good Men Project. He is also the first poet laureate of Columbia, South Carolina.

Links:

• Columbia City Poet Laureate http://www.columbiapoet.org/
• University of South Carolina Bio http://www.sc.edu/study/colleges_schools/artsandsciences/our-people/faculty-staff/madden_ed.php
• The State recognizes anniversary of Charleston church shooting with front-page poem http://ivoh.org/state-recognizes-anniversary-charleston-church-shooting-front-page-poem/ 
• POEM: The lesson that night http://www.thestate.com/news/local/article84322027.html
• Parking Ticket Poetry http://www.columbiapoet.org/2017/04/01/did-you-get-a-parking-ticket/
• Ed Madden’s poem ‘Body Politic’ honoring Columbia’s strength in unity, diversity http://www.thestate.com/news/local/article130049739.html 

Uncompromising Activist Richard Greener – Episode 38

Dr. Curtis Rogers interviews Dr. Katherine Reynolds Chaddock, author of Uncompromising Activist: Richard Greener, First Black Graduate of Harvard College. Richard Theodore Greener (1844–1922) was a renowned black activist and scholar. In 1870, he was the first black graduate of Harvard College. During Reconstruction, he was the first black faculty member at a southern white college, the University of South Carolina. He was even the first black US diplomat to a white country, serving in Vladivostok, Russia. A notable speaker and writer for racial equality, he also served as a dean of the Howard University School of Law and as the administrative head of the Ulysses S. Grant Monument Association. Yet he died in obscurity, his name barely remembered.

Katherine Reynolds Chaddock is distinguished professor emerita of education at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of The Multi-Talented Mr. Erskine: Shaping Mass Culture through Great Books and Fine Music and Visions and Vanities: John Andrew Rice of Black Mountain College.

Links

• Johns Hopkins University Press https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/content/uncompromising-activist
• Dr. Katherine Reynolds Chaddock https://www.sc.edu/study/colleges_schools/education/faculty-staff/chaddock_katherine.php
• Richard T. Greener Memorial https://www.sc.edu/greener/

Taking Root: The Nature Writing of William and Adam Summer of Pomaria – LibraryVoicesSC Episode 36

Dr. Curtis Rogers discusses a new University of South Carolina Press book by Dr. James Kibler, Taking Root: The Nature Writing of William and Adam Summer of Pomaria. William Summer founded the renowned Pomaria Nursery, which thrived from the 1840s to the 1870s in central South Carolina and became the center of a bustling town that today bears its name. The nursery grew into one of the most important American nurseries of the antebellum period, offering wide varieties of fruit trees and ornamentals to gardeners throughout the South. Summer also published catalogs containing well-selected and thoroughly tested varieties of plants and assisted his brother, Adam, in publishing several agricultural journals throughout the 1850s and up until 1862. In Taking Root, James Everett Kibler, Jr., collects for the first time the nature writing of William and Adam Summer, two of America’s earliest environmental authors. Their essays on sustainable ecology and their respect for Mother Earth have surprising relevance still today.

The Summer brothers owned farms in Newberry and Lexington Counties, where they created veritable experimental stations for plants adapted to the Southern climate. At its peak the nursery offered more than one thousand varieties of apples, pears, peaches, plums, figs, apricots, and grapes developed and chosen specifically for the southern environment, as well as offering an equal number of ornamentals, including four hundred varieties of repeat-blooming roses. The brothers experimented with sustainable farming, reforestation, land reclamation, soil regeneration, crop diversity rather than the prevalent cotton monoculture, and animal breeds accustomed to hot climates from Carolina to Central Florida.

Written over a span of two decades, their essays offer an impressive environmental ethic. By 1860 Adam had concluded that a person’s treatment of nature is a moral issue. Sustainability and long-term goals, rather than get-rich-quick schemes, were key to this philosophy. The brothers’ keen interest in literature is evident in the quality of their writing; their essays and sketches are always readable, sometimes poetic, and occasionally humorous and satiric. A representative sampling of their more-than-six hundred articles appears in this volume.

Wendell Berry, American novelist, poet, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer, provides a foreword.

Dr. James Everett Kibler, Jr., is the author of five novels and a volume of poetry, Poems from Scorched Earth, all with environmental themes. His agrarian chronicle, Our Fathers’ Fields, published by the University of South Carolina Press, won the Fellowship of Southern Writers Award for Nonfiction. Kibler has just completed a biography of Adam Summer and is editing William and Adam Summer’s garden calendar.

Links

• USC Press https://www.sc.edu/uscpress/books/2017/7774.html
• Wendell Berry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendell_Berry
• Abbeville Institute: James Everett Kibler https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/author/james-kibler/

Interview with Fiber Artist Susan Lenz – Episode 35

Dr. Curtis Rogers interviews Susan Lenz about her recent South Carolina State Library installation titled, “Threads: Gathering My Thoughts.” The textile industry had an enormous impact on South Carolina.  From the late nineteenth century through most of the twentieth century, the textile industry dominated the state’s manufacturing.  In the SC State Library’s exhibit, historical images were used to honor South Carolina’s rich textile legacy and teach how the textile industry shaped cultures, demographics, and economics in our state. This exhibit included the artwork of professional studio artist, Susan Lenz, whose work has been juried into numerous national and international exhibits, featured in solo shows all over the United States, and shown on television and in print. By combining historical South Carolina textile images with the creativity of Ms. Lenz, thread was used to symbolize the former abundance in Southern textile mills and a physical manifestation of millions of thoughts running through anyone’s brain.  This exhibit explored an ongoing engagement - and entanglement - with fibers. 

Links:

• Susan Lenz - http://www.susanlenz.com
• Threads at the State Library blog post - http://artbysusanlenz.blogspot.com/2017/09/threads-at-sc-state-library.html