Given that March is Women’s History Month, now is an especially apropos time to celebrate the many women who have shaped the history of Charlotte’s community of readers and writers. For the purposes of this blog post, I have selected six such women. Not all of their names are widely known today, but each of them made a lasting contribution to our community.
Mary Rebecca Denny was the founding chair of the English Department at UNC Charlotte. In 1946, Bonnie Cone hired Mary Denny as the first full-time faculty member at what was then called the Charlotte Center of the University of North Carolina. Denny had been an English professor at Queens College (now called Queens University), but she decided to leave her position at Queens College and join forces with Bonnie Cone. When the Charlotte Center evolved into Charlotte College in 1949, she stayed on and created the English Department. From 1949 until 1964, she served as the chair of Charlotte College’s English Department. Shortly after Charlotte College became the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Denny retired, becoming UNC Charlotte’s first professor emerita. During her time as the chair of the English Department, she founded the college newspaper and a college literary magazine. The Denny Building at UNC Charlotte is named in her honor.
Mary T. Harper played a major role in introducing African American literature to the students at UNC Charlotte and to the larger Charlotte community. When Dr. Harper joined the university in 1971, she was the first full-time Black faculty member in UNC Charlotte’s English Department. She played a pivotal role in creating and teaching the first African American literature classes in the department. In addition to her work at UNC Charlotte, she co-founded (with Dr. Bertha Maxwell-Roddey) the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Afro-American Cultural Center in 1974. This center is now known as the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American Arts + Culture. In her work with this center, she arranged for community programs and presentations on African American writers.
Irene Blair Honeycutt taught creative writing during her long tenure as a faculty member at Central Piedmont Community College. In 1993, she founded CPCC’s Spring Literary Festival and served as the director of this festival for fourteen years. This festival expanded into CPCC’s Sensoria Festival, a celebration of literature and the arts. Upon her retirement in 2006, CPCC established the Irene Blair Honeycutt Lifetime Achievement Award. Besides teaching and doing community engagement work, she published four poetry collections, the most recent of which is Beneath the Bamboo Sky, which came out in 2017.
Adelia Kimball founded the Charlotte Writers Club (CWC) on June 6, 1922, and served as the club’s first president. She continued to lead the club until 1930 when she moved to New York City to work as an editor for the publisher Louis Carrier & Company. During her tenure as CWC’s president, she organized and ran the club meetings, arranged for speakers, and helped found the club’s initial writing contest. Now, more than 100 years after its founding, the Charlotte Writers Club is still going strong. In recognition of her contributions to the history of the club, the club established the Adelia Kimball Founders Award for “extraordinary service to the CWC and the greater writing community.”
Dannye Romine Powell made her debut on the Charlotte literary scene in 1975 when she became the book editor for The Charlotte Observer. She remained the paper’s book editor until 1992. Back in those days, the paper published a two-page book section every Sunday. It included original book reviews, interviews with authors, and news about local literary events. In her role as book editor, she often interviewed Southern authors. She decided to collect these interviews in a book titled Parting the Curtains: Interviews with Southern Writers, which came out in 1995. In addition to her interview book, she has published five poetry collections, two of which have won the North Carolina Poetry Society’s Brockman-Campbell Award for best book by a North Carolina poet.
Allegra Westbrooks was an important figure in the history of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library. When she moved to Charlotte in 1947 to manage the Brevard Street Library branch of the public library, the library system was still segregated. The Brevard Street Library was one of only two branches that served African Americans at the time. After the library system desegregated in 1956, she moved to the Main Library where she ran the acquisitions operation before being promoted to Supervisor of Branches in 1957, making her the first African American to hold the position of supervisor in the library. During her career with the library, she played a major role in developing the library’s outreach programs and expanding the library’s branch system. She collaborated with community groups to make books available to children who did not live near branches, and she started a bookmobile program to bring books to residents throughout the county. In recognition of her many contributions, the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library Board of Trustees renamed the Beatties Ford Regional Library in her honor. In April 2020, this branch became known as the Allegra Westbrooks Regional Library.
Each of these six women made lasting contributions to Charlotte’s community of readers and writers. Storied Charlotte is a better and more vibrant place because of the work and leadership of Mary Rebecca Denny, Mary T. Harper, Irene Blair Honeycutt, Adelia Kimball, Dannye Romine Powell, and Allegra Westbrooks.