"Pay attention to the mystery. Apprentice to the best apprentices. Rediscover in nature your own biology. Write and speak with appreciation for all you have been gifted. Recognize that a politics with no biology, or a politics without field biology, or a political platform in which human biological requirements form but one plank, is a vision of the gates of Hell."
Barry Lopez
Biographical:
Kathryn Stripling Byer was raised on a farm in Southwest Georgia, where the material for much of her first poetry originated. She graduated from Wesleyan College, Macon, Georgia, with a degree in English literature, and afterward, received her MFA degree from UNC-Greensboro, where she studied with Fred Chappell and Robert Watson, as well as forming enduring friendships with James Applewhite and Gibbons Ruark. After graduation she worked at Western Carolina University, becoming Poet-in-Residence in 1990. Her poetry, prose, and fiction have appeared widely, including Hudson Review, Poetry, The Atlantic, Georgia Review, Shenandoah, and Southern Poetry Review. Often anthologized, her work has also been featured online, where she maintains the blogs "Here, Where I Am," and "The Mountain Woman." Her body of work was discussed along with that of Charles Wright, Robert Morgan, Fred Chappell, Jeff Daniel Marion, and Jim Wayne Miller in Six Poets from the Mountain South, by John Lang, published by LSU Press. Her first book of poetry, The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest, was published in the AWP Award Series in 1986, followed by the Lamont (now Laughlin) prize-winning Wildwood Flower, from LSU Press. Her subsequent collections have been published in the LSU Press Poetry Series, receiving various awards, including the Hanes Poetry Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Poetry Award, and the Roanoke-Chowan Award. She served for five years as North Carolina's first woman poet laureate. She lives in the mountains of western North Carolina with her husband and three dogs.
Events:
North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame, Weymouth Center, Southern Pines, North Carolina, October 14
North Carolina Writers Network Fall Conference, Master Class in poetry, Cary, NC, November 4
Malaprop's Bookstore, Asheville, North Carolina, Novermber 11
City Lights Bookstore, Sylva, NC, with Kathryn Kirkpatrick, Joe Mills, and Julie Suk, December 1.
Black Mountain College Museum, Black Mountain, NC, with Kathryn Kirkpatrick and Katherine Soniat, March.
Saint Francis College, Brooklyn, NY, March, March 21.
UNC-Greensboro Writers Series, April 10.
Nazim Hikmet Festival, reading with Fady Joudah, April 14.
NC Writers Network summer residency, WCU, Cullowhee, NC, poetry workshop leader, July 13-14.
Bookmarks book festival, Winston-Salem, September--more details later.
Kathryn Stripling Byer was raised on a farm in Southwest Georgia, where the material for much of her first poetry originated. She graduated from Wesleyan College, Macon, Georgia, with a degree in English literature, and afterward, received her MFA degree from UNC-Greensboro, where she studied with Fred Chappell and Robert Watson, as well as forming enduring friendships with James Applewhite and Gibbons Ruark. After graduation she worked at Western Carolina University, becoming Poet-in-Residence in 1990. Her poetry, prose, and fiction have appeared widely, including Hudson Review, Poetry, The Atlantic, Georgia Review, Shenandoah, and Southern Poetry Review. Often anthologized, her work has also been featured online, where she maintains the blogs "Here, Where I Am," and "The Mountain Woman." Her body of work was discussed along with that of Charles Wright, Robert Morgan, Fred Chappell, Jeff Daniel Marion, and Jim Wayne Miller in Six Poets from the Mountain South, by John Lang, published by LSU Press. Her first book of poetry, The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest, was published in the AWP Award Series in 1986, followed by the Lamont (now Laughlin) prize-winning Wildwood Flower, from LSU Press. Her subsequent collections have been published in the LSU Press Poetry Series, receiving various awards, including the Hanes Poetry Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Poetry Award, and the Roanoke-Chowan Award. She served for five years as North Carolina's first woman poet laureate. She lives in the mountains of western North Carolina with her husband and three dogs.
Events:
North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame, Weymouth Center, Southern Pines, North Carolina, October 14
North Carolina Writers Network Fall Conference, Master Class in poetry, Cary, NC, November 4
Malaprop's Bookstore, Asheville, North Carolina, Novermber 11
City Lights Bookstore, Sylva, NC, with Kathryn Kirkpatrick, Joe Mills, and Julie Suk, December 1.
Black Mountain College Museum, Black Mountain, NC, with Kathryn Kirkpatrick and Katherine Soniat, March.
Saint Francis College, Brooklyn, NY, March, March 21.
UNC-Greensboro Writers Series, April 10.
Nazim Hikmet Festival, reading with Fady Joudah, April 14.
NC Writers Network summer residency, WCU, Cullowhee, NC, poetry workshop leader, July 13-14.
Bookmarks book festival, Winston-Salem, September--more details later.
NEWS
Descent is one of three finalists in the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance 2013 book awards in poetry. The other two finalists are Natasha Trethewey's Thrall
and George Ellison's Permanent Camp.
Descent also made the Poetry Foundation's best seller list for the week of November 20th. Link:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/books.
DESCENT
POEMS FROM DESCENT
from Southern Fictions: a sonnet sequence I don’t know. I still can’t get it right, the way those dirt roads cut across the flats and led to shacks where hounds and muddy shoats skulked roundabouts. Describing it sounds trite as hell, the good old South I love to hate. The truth? What’s that? How should I know? I stayed inside too much. I learned to boast of stupid things. I kept my ears shut tight, as we kept doors locked, windows locked, the curtains drawn. Now I know why. The dark could hide things from us. Dark could see while we could not. Sometimes those dirt roads shocked me, where they ended up: I watched a dog die in the ditch. The man who shot him winked at me. (Published by Jacar Press, 2011, limited edition chapbook) At the End he said nothing of sun rising over the hoar-frosted scrub pines and nothing of mist he saw rising from deer scat. Never a word did he whisper of morning cold burning his throat as he stood at the dawn's edge. His open mouth bore but a fleck of blood, last uttered syllable as he fell back to the pillow, ice growing lace shutters over his eyeballs, but not before he pushed through holly-thorn into the clearing, the deer turning toward him, a rush of quail lifting their wings as he watched his breath leaving like white cloth he once saw a carnival magician unwind from his mouth and throw to the crowd where he stood wanting proof but ashamed to raise his hands like the other boys, grabbing at air. for Ulmont Campbell, my grandfather |
"A Kathryn Byer poem is utterly compelling from its opening lines: “Now take this, she’d say, her mouth / full of pins--a bird’s tail / of fastenings held tight / against revelation.” Even those of us who’ve read and loved her work for years scratch our heads and mutter to ourselves, How does she do that? Her work is to be cherished for its beauty, its courage, and the gift of its revelation. Her poems shine a light that we yearn for here in the darkness of the Twenty-First Century.
------David Huddle, poet and novelist, author of BLACK SNAKE AT THE FAMILY REUNION "From the glorious opening poem, the mourning sound of the morning train weaves through Kathryn Stripling Byer's new collection, as much a part of the hills of home as are its sins and beauties. Oh, the longing to shed forever what we are and what made us, at the same time hugging the litany to us that brings it all back: Cullowhee Creek, Buzzards Roost, hay bales, blackberries, grandmother’s gladiolas and lace doilies, and the earth that knew us better than we knew ourselves. Such longing in these pages, such hunger, such “grabbing at air.” -----Alice Friman, author of Vinculum and numerous other books of poetry. "This may be Kathryn Byer's most soulful outing. If there is something autumnal in its tone, well, let's say it has that Brahmsian feeling, the accomplished offering of a master." ----Fred Chappell, poet and novelist, Author of I AM ONE OF YOU FOREVER 
From my kitchen window.
from DROUGHT DAYS
6. Now take this, she’d say, her mouth full of pins--a bird’s tail of fastenings held tight against revelation. What now? And where? I was lost till she lifted the limp tape and held my hand hard on the selvage while she reckoned grain-line and measurement. Taking the straight of it so that the garment would fall clean to plumb. What she called a good finish. A clean sweep to hem-level, a dress in which she could walk out the front door or be laid down at last like the lady she knew she was. 
Quilt made by my grandmother, Marion Fry Stripling, discovered in a hobbit-closet on my last trip home.
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