Monthly Archives: January 2023

Junious “Jay” Ward is one of Charlotte’s best-known poets.  His slam poetry performances are legendary.  In fact, in 2019 he was named the Individual World Poetry Slam Champion.  In addition to performing his original poems, he has had great success publishing poems in various journals as well as in a chapbook titled Sing Me a Lesser Wound (2020).  One of his most important recognitions came in April 2022 when the City of Charlotte officially named him the Poet Laureate of Charlotte.  Next month, will see the publication of Ward’s first full-length poetry collection.  Titled Composition, this collection has an official release date of February 7, 2023, but the book is already available for pre-order from Button Poetry:  https://buttonpoetry.com/product/composition/

I recently contacted Ward and asked him for more information about how he came to write Composition.  Here is what he sent to me:

The original set of poems that would later become Composition was kind of an exploration of my own Blackness, what it meant. But I knew that wasn’t the whole story. Why did I want to write about Blackness? What meaning did that hold for me, why was it important I explore that theme, why should anyone care? As I asked myself those questions, I realized this manuscript wasn’t simply about Blackness, it was about identity. It was about how we look at race and identity through the lens of being multiracial. It was about how we choose to identify, and how, often, people make that choice for us. It was also about being from the South.

I was raised in a rural town in eastern North Carolina. My father died when I was 21 years old. The manuscript evolved to include sub themes of grief, life in the rural South, and self-discovery. 

I interact with form, documents, and visual elements throughout the book. For example, it was important for me to not only capture the ‘spirit of conversation’ around interracial marriages at the time that my parents got married, 1969, but also to find a way to enter those conversations, to ‘talk back’ to certain documents. Some poems are blackouts or erasures of documents like Senate Bill 219, and include footnotes or annotations. Other poems are in form (sonnet, ghazal, contrapuntal, etc.) or are combinations of forms, so that each poem becomes kind of a metaphor for the entire manuscript.

As Charlotte’s inaugural Poet Laureate, I am keenly interested in bridging the perceived gap between “performance” poets and “literary” poets, as I’ve had a modicum of success in both arenas. I think this book is also a step in that direction; a blending of two mediums, a way to blur or solidify the lines, a way to ask ourselves what those lines even mean, or perhaps more importantly, a way to feel comfortable identifying oneself as being on either or neither side of those lines.

For readers who want to know more about Ward, please click on the following link:

https://jwardpoetry.com/home Charlotte is one of only a few cities that has its own Poet Laureate, and Charlotte is the only city that can claim Junious “Jay” Ward as a local poet.  In Japan, they call their gifted artists “Living National Treasures.” Well, as I see it, Ward is one of Storied Charlotte’s living treasures

In 2022, North Carolina Humanities celebrated its 50^th anniversary as the leading nonprofit organization charged with advancing public access to and support for the humanities across the state. North Carolina Humanities is the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). As part of its celebration, North Carolina Humanities launched North Carolina Reads, a statewide program in which participants read and discussed five books dealing with issues and concerns that face the residents of the state.  North Carolina Reads was so successful that North Carolina Humanities decided to bring back North Carolina Reads in 2023. 

The person who is coordinating this year’s North Carolina Reads program is Melissa Giblin.  She is the Director of the North Carolina Center for the Book, which is the North Carolina Humanities’ collection of literature and reading programs.  I reached out to Melissa and asked her for more information about North Carolina Reads.  Here is what she sent to me:

Building on the successes of the 2022 series, North Carolina Humanities has brought back its popular statewide book club, North Carolina Reads. In 2023 North Carolina Reads features five new books that explore issues of racial, social, and gender equality and the history and culture of North Carolina. The five selected books feature stories of American perseverance and diversity. The people, places, and events in the books also pose critical questions about how North Carolinians view their role in helping to form a more just and inclusive society.

At the heart of North Carolina Reads is NC Humanities’ desire to connect communities through shared reading experiences. Reading is important because it helps develop critical-thinking skills; strengthens minds, vocabulary, and mental health; and creates opportunities to empathize with others’ stories and experiences. North Carolina Reads uses books as a way to create space for talking about important, timely issues.

Starting in February 2023, NC Humanities will host virtual monthly book club events where participants will hear from guest speakers, including book authors and topic experts. Libraries, community groups, and individuals across North Carolina are encouraged to read along with NC Humanities and host community programs of their own to accompany NC Humanities’ virtual events.  The schedule for these events is listed below:

February 22, 2023 at 6:30 PM – Carolina Built an online conversation with author Kianna Alexander and Dr. Hilary Green

March 27, 2023 at 6:30 PM – Game Changers: Dean Smith, Charlie Scott, and the Era that Transformed a Southern College Town online conversation with author Art Chansky and Dr. Matt Andrews 

April 2023 – Money Rock: A Family’s Story of Cocaine, Race, and Ambition in the New South – conversation with Pam Kelley. Other Book Club Details Forthcoming! 

May 23, 2023 at 6:30 PM – Under a Gilded Moon online conversation with author Joy Jordan-Lake and Dr. Jennifer Le Zotte

June 27, 2023 at 6:30 PM – Step It Up and Go: The Story of North Carolina Popular Music online conversation with author David Menconi and Dolphus Ramseur

North Carolina Reads is a unique book club. Not only is it one of the only statewide book clubs in North Carolina, but it is also an essential program resource for local, community-based book club groups and regional libraries. 

North Carolina Humanities encourages all North Carolinians to participate in North Carolina Reads. Watch our short video on how you can participate!  More information is available at https://nchumanities.org/program/north-carolina-reads  Please direct all North Carolina Reads-related questions to Melissa Giblin, Director of the North Carolina Center for the Book, at mgiblin@nchumanities.org or (704) 687-1526.

My appreciation goes to Melissa and the North Carolina Center for the Book for organizing this year’s North Carolina Reads program.  I understand that North Carolina Reads is a statewide program, but I take a certain amount of civic pride that the North Carolina Center for Book is headquartered in Charlotte.  As I see it, Storied Charlotte and the North Carolina Center for the Book are a perfect match.  

Over the past few years, I have been hearing a lot about Misha Lazzara.  I first heard her name from the creative writing professors in the English Department at UNC Charlotte.  They described Misha as a very talented graduate student who was studying fiction writing in our department.  I then heard that she had been accepted into the MFA program in creative writing at North Carolina State University.  Next, I heard that she had completed her MFA and had come back to our department to teach a creative writing course as a part-time faculty member.  Most recently, I heard that her debut novel, Manmade Constellations, had just been released by Blackstone Publishing.  Well, after hearing so much about her, I decided to check out her novel for myself.

Manmade Constellations is a road-trip story of sorts.  The novel begins when Lo Gunderson, an alienated young woman from a small town in Minnesota, responds to an ad for a “free car.” When she meets Blanche Peterson, the dying woman who is giving away the car, Lo learns that the free car comes with a condition.  Blanche wants Lo to find her estranged son.  Lo agrees to the deal, but first, she needs to get the car in running condition.  She gets help from a young car mechanic from North Carolina named John Blank, and he ends up joining Lo on her quest to find Blanche’s son. For much of the novel, Lo and John travel together, experiencing the American landscape and, in the process, learning a lot about each other.  The central characters become more and more complex as the story progresses.  They have secrets, difficult family histories, and longings that they don’t fully acknowledge or understand.  As a reader, you have a sense that you are traveling in the backseat with these characters, and they make for very memorable traveling companions. 

After reading Manmade Constellations, I contacted Misha and asked her how she came to write this novel.  Here is what she sent to me:

I’ve wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember. When I was eight or nine my mom gifted me the children’s book The Lives of Writers by Kathleen Krull, which highlights the biographies of a dozen or two well-known writers including Murasaki Shikibu, who I happened to name a pet turtle after. There was also Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, and Langston Hughes, among others. Ostensibly, I had shown an interest in reading and writing as a young girl, but it was really with that book in my hand that I set my sights on the job title. 

However, as it does for many, life nuzzled in. It felt like I had only been handed my bachelor’s degree in English before I found myself married and starting a family. Later, when I entered UNC Charlotte to get my master’s degree eight years out of undergrad, I was pregnant with my third child while my husband traveled for work. With all those responsibilities, I applied to grad school with more “logical” intentions. The plan was to focus on English, so I might find a job teaching one day down the line, once my own kids were all set up in grade school. True, I had the unkempt and abandoned manuscript of Manmade Constellations, a novel I’d been working on through my twenties, in the proverbial drawer (a dusty computer file), but as I formed the Graduate School Masterplan with my husband, teaching English felt like the responsible thing to do.

That responsible thing lasted about a week into my first writing workshop with Dr. Aaron Gwyn, which happened to be the very first class I signed up for and the first graduate class I ever stepped foot into. I decided (bravely or naively, I can’t say) to switch my focus to creative writing. Still, I worked on a project that I deemed more serious–a wartime historical fiction that remains unfinished–up until the pandemic descended. 

By that time, I was almost halfway through my MFA at North Carolina State University. The work of homeschooling my kids, teaching Intro to Fiction for NCSU via Zoom, and taking my own course load made it clear to me that WWII research would not fit on the docket. So, I had an idea to rewrite that old story–Manmade Constellations–from scratch. 

For me, the book is largely a story about home. And for me, Minnesota is home. That’s where I grew up at least. When do we stop calling where we grew up ‘home?’ I don’t know if I’ll ever have an answer for that. I’ve lived here in Charlotte for almost fourteen years, and I only lived in Minnesota for eighteen. Time is catching up to me, I suppose, but still it was cathartic to revisit those old haunts–the lakes, the wood-paneled diners, and those flat stretches of highway broken up by even more lakes. 

Still, I knew that the South, and more precisely North Carolina, would have to fit into this story of home somehow. Since I first visited Marshall, a small railway town outside of Asheville, I’d been enthralled by the half-hidden settlement of “snake churches” in the area. In the book, John Blank, a good-natured Southern kid who trailed his way up to small-town Midwest, harbors secrets that connect to those enigmatic sanctuaries. 

So, if the question is how this novel came to be and how it relates to my life here in North Carolina, the answer is that I may have never written Manmade Constellations, or any book at all, if it hadn’t been for Dr. Lara Vetter encouraging me to apply at my first meeting at UNC Charlotte when I was unsure whether I was qualified for graduate school, or perhaps I’d never given it a shot if I hadn’t been so inspired by Dr. Gwyn’s writing workshop that first semester. 

Well, that, and also the snakes. 

For readers who want to know more about Misha, please click on the following link:  https://mishalazzara.com/?v=2e5df5aa3470

As a long-time member of UNC Charlotte’s English Department, I am always proud when our former students go on to do great things.  I am proud of Misha, and I highly recommend her debut novel.  There is a new star in Storied Charlotte’s literary galaxy, and it’s called Manmade Constellations.

With the end of each year, I always take a moment to look in the rear-view mirror before I step on the gas pedal and make my merge into the traffic of the new year.  For Charlotte’s community of readers and writers, 2022 turned out pretty well. The year saw the launching of Litmosphere: Journal of Charlotte Lit and the return of EpicFest, the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library’s free literary festival for children and their families. The year also marked the return of the library’s Verse and Vino as an in-person event.  Numerous books by Charlotte writers came out in 2022.  Listed below are twelve of my favorites.  These books include fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and children’s books:

FICTION

Burning Shakespeare by A. J. Hartley.  In this time-travel novel, an American businessman and Shakespeare hater travels back in time to Renaissance London on a mission to eradicate Shakespeare from history.  He is countered by three recently deceased people from our time who are given an opportunity to come back to life if they go back in time and stop the businessman from carrying out his mission.

Deadly Declarations by Landis Wade.  This mystery novel is set in a fictional retirement community located in Charlotte.  Three residents of the “Independence Retirement Community” join forces to solve a mystery related to the famous and controversial Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence.  The protagonists in this novel are anything but retiring.  They are feisty, independent, and fully engaged in the world around them.  They take on a powerful law firm, a corrupt politician, and a secret society and they prove that they are more than equal to the challenge. 

The Grand Design: A Novel of Dorothy Draper by Joy Callaway.  For the most part, this historical novel takes place in The Greenbrier, the famous resort in West Virginia.  The central character has much in common with Dorothy Draper, the pioneering interior designer who renovated The Greenbrier after it was used as a makeshift hospital during World War II.

Manmade Constellations by Misha Lazzara. This contemporary novel combines the pleasures of an American road-trip story with the emotional tug of a relationship story involving two traveling companions from quite different worlds.

Secret Lives by Mark de Castrique.  The central character in this thriller mystery is Ethel Fiona Crestwater, a 75-year-old retired FBI agent who runs a boardinghouse near Washington, D.C.  The reviewer from Publishers Weekly describes this character as “an elderly Nancy Drew” who is “ready to bend a few rules to achieve her goal of seeing justice done.”

Song of Redemption by Malika J. Stevely. Most of this historical novel takes place on a French and English-speaking plantation in Louisiana in the years just before the Civil War, but the opening chapter is set in 1932.  In this chapter, a group of construction workers are fixing up an abandoned plantation mansion when they discover the body of a woman behind one of the walls.  This event actually happened.  When Malika heard about it, she decided to write a novel based on the life of this woman.

NONFICTION

Child: A Memoir by Judy Goldman. In Child, Judy writes about her relationship with Mattie Culp, the Black woman who cared for Judy as a white Jewish girl growing up in Rock Hill, South Carolina, during the 1940s and ‘50s.  Judy examines how the racism of the Jim Crow South affected her relationship with Mattie.

Legacy:  Three Centuries of Black History in Charlotte, North Carolina by Pamela Grundy.  This book provides readers with a concise overview of the history of Black culture in Charlotte.  As Pamela documents in her book, African Americans have played important roles in the history of Charlotte from the origins of the city in the 1750s to the present day.

POETRY

The House Inside My Head by Chris Arvidson.  In this debut chapbook, Chris writes about specific places and her responses to these places.  Among the places she explores are Lake Michigan, Jerusalem, a bathroom at a rest stop, and the Elmwood Cemetery in Charlotte.

The Metaphorist by Martin (Marty) Settle.  The poems in this collection look at nature through a metaphorical lens.  To quote Marty, “This book of poetry comes, first of all, from my unending love of plants and animals. Over the years, I have become quite familiar with the flora, fauna, and fungi of our region. But these poems are not just any nature poems, but nature poems that are in line with current, ecological discoveries and philosophies.”

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

All the Places We Call Home by Patric Gopo.  In the beginning of All the Places We Call Home, a young girl spins a globe on her bedside table and wonders about the various places that figure in her family history. Like Patrice, the girl lives in America but has family roots in multiple parts of the world.   The girl’s mother then shares bedtime stories about these special places.

The Talk by Alicia D. Williams. The Talk tells the story of Jay, a young Black boy who is growing up in an American city with his tight-knit family and his regular group of neighborhood friends. At first, Jay is more or less oblivious to the realities of racial prejudice, but as he matures, his parents and grandparents take him aside and talk to him about how to respond to racial profiling and other forms of prejudice that Black children, especially Black boys, often encounter when they make the transition from childhood to pre-adolescence. The Talk is a book about racism, but at its core, it is a celebration of a loving Black family.

THERE ARE MORE THAN TWELVE

The twelve books mentioned above are by no means the only books that Charlotte-area writers published in 2022.  I could mention many more books, including a number of excellent scholarly works written by professors I know at UNC Charlotte.  Still, this list provides a good sampling of the wide variety of books that came out of Storied Charlotte in 2022.