Storied Charlotte

When I heard the sad news that Charlotte poet Julie Suk died on October 9, 2025, I flashed back to the time I heard Julie read several of her poems from her 1991 collection titled Heartwood. I don’t remember where the reading took place, but I remember that several other poets were also reading, including the Davidson poet Tony Abbott. What stands out most clearly in my memory of this event was how gracious and supportive Julie was to the other poets who were reading with her.  I ran into Julie a few other times, including once at the Charlotte Nature Museum where she once led programs and taught nature courses. 

I never got to know her well, but I heard her name mentioned so often by other Charlotte poets that I decided to do a little research on her career. I learned that she was born in Mobile, Alabama, but in 1966 she and her husband moved to Charlotte where she remained for the rest of her life. Initially she focused her creative energies on painting, but she became interested in writing poetry in the late 1960s. In 1978 she and UNC Charlotte English professor Anne Newman edited Bear Crossings: An Anthology of North American Poets. In 1980 Julie published her first collection of her own poetry. Titled The Medicine Woman, the collection came out with St. Andrews Press. She went on to publish five more collections: Heartwood: Poems in 1991; The Angel of Obsession: Poems in 1992; The Dark Takes Aim in 2003; Lie Down with Me: New and Selected Poems in 2011; and Astonished to Wake: Poems in 2016.  Julie won numerous awards over the course of her career including the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine in 1993 and the Irene Blair Honeycutt Lifetime Achievement Award from Central Piedmont Community College in 2004.

For the purposes of writing this blog post, I decided to seek the help of other people who knew Julie well. I asked them to share with me their memories of Julie. One of these people is Frye Gaillard, a former Charlotte Observer reporter and one of Julie’s relatives.  Here is what Frye sent to me:

Julie was my first cousin, 22 years older than I, but we were extremely close. I did the eulogy at her funeral in her hometown of Mobile. When she turned 100 she entered a memory care unit in Charlotte and I visited her 4 or 5 times. Her short term memory was gone, but when we talked about the long shadow and double edged legacy of our southern family in Mobile, the fog lifted and the memories came rushing back. We talked about her last book, Astonished to Wake, which came out in 2015 on the eve of her 92nd birthday. We brought her for a reading at the University of South Alabama, where I was writer in residence, and the faculty and students who came to her very well attended presentation were completely charmed – both by her poetry, and by her irreverent humor and her humility about her work. She and I talked in the memory care unit about our decision to become writers and therefore to push back a bit against some of the opinions and cultural understandings on which we were raised. She looked up from the bed with a little smile. “We bad,” she said. Julie was a great poet and a lovely human being. Her 101 years on earth were rich and full and productive. I will miss her a lot. 

I also contacted Joseph Bathanti, a former North Carolina Poet Laureate and a one-time resident of Charlotte. Here is what Joseph sent me:

When I arrived in Charlotte, in the summer of 1976, Julie Suk was already an acknowledged maestra of poetry: elegant, even regal, yet thoroughly humble, generous, shimmering. Folks who knew Julie know exactly what I mean. In her presence, I was in awe, tempted to genuflect.

A number of years ago, she attended a reading I gave at Park Road Books and I was so flattered. She took the time once to write a congratulatory note about one of my books and I’ll never part with it. In it, she said the loveliest things and I felt validated, acknowledged, by someone I considered a genius of poetry, a genius of shared humanity. Her poems embody the vested belief that words wielded genuinely with a clear eye, without a wit of sentimentally, engender illumination. She was our Emily Dickinson, our Elizabeth Bishop, our North Star.

Julie was active in a longstanding writing group. I reached out to Dede Wilson, one of the members of this group, and I asked her about her memories of Julie. Here is what Dede sent to me:

Julie Suk was a force. Though born in Alabama, deeply southern and softspoken, Julie wrote with a bold and fearless tone, more revelatory than most. Never afraid to write of deep human desires, she was at one with nature and humanity. “I think the body is the loneliest place earth owns,” she wrote in “The Clearing.” 

Though Julie’s works were published in the most prominent journals and received numerous awards, I believe she wrote with a monumental power and deserved even wider recognition.

I met Julie when she read from her book Heartwood at Queens College in 1991. Among the poems she read was “The Living Waters,” an account of a revival under a pitched tent, where she and a boy had crawled through the mud and played touchy games under the tent flap. I was shocked. Eventually I learned that Julie’s poems were fearless. They embraced what was real. 

Some years after this, I joined the poetry group that met once a week around a table in Julie’s home. In addition to Julie, the group included Dannye Romine Powell, Susan Ludvigson, Lucinda Grey, Mary Hunter Daly and me. We met at noon, brought our poems, our sandwiches, and (at any excuse) a bottle of wine. These days all that has changed. We now meet on Zoom, and we’re a smaller group consisting of Julie Funderburk, Steven Knauth (our first man!), Patty Hooper and me.

Though I always thought she wanted to live forever, and she did make it until 101, Julie embraced life and the splendors of nature in a way few people do. “May clover fill my mouth to the end,” she wrote in her poem “Compline.”

In “Between Lives,” Julie writes: 

            “…and at the end,

            a brief flaring of the one we’d hoped to become

            escorting us into the light.”

Julie was friends with many Charlotte writers, including Judy Goldman, the author of The Rest of Our Lives: A Memoir and seven other books. I contacted Judy, and here is what Judy shared with me:

Mostly, Julie wrote long poems, lush with wild imagination. But here’s a short one from her book Astonished to Wake:

RUNNING OUT ALONE

Once for no particular reason I decided to run away —

leave family and friends waving from the door. Tears.

Here’s your lunch bag my mother said with a kiss and smile.

Down the walk, across the street, blocks and blocks into the world

I ran, my pumping heart on a leash.

Long or short, deeply intimate or drawing on the natural world, dark or mischievously tongue-in-cheek — her poems were extraordinary. Lyricism ran through Julie’s veins. She was a poet through and through. But she was not just one of the truly important poetic talents around here; she was one of the truly important poetic talents in the country. I remember one poem of hers was rejected by the Carolina Quarterly, then accepted by Poetry and named the winner of their prestigious Bess Hokin Prize. Julie is not just remembered for her dazzling poetry. Warmhearted, witty, intelligent, and yes, a little ditzy at times, she was dearly loved and cherished by all of us who knew her.

Julie was also friends with fellow Charlotte poet Irene Blair Honeycutt, whose latest collection, Mountains of the Moon: Poems & Pieces, came out last year. Julie and Irene read each other’s poems, and they always supported one another. When I reached out to Irene, she sent me the following response:

          When I think of Julie Gaillard Suk, I think of music, art and poetry.

          Her sensuous language. I imagine her waiting in the darkness

          of [herself] as she revises, revises and revises, finally coming 

          to the light, having found what the heart recites in Drost’s 

          “St. Matthew and the Angel,” the painting she chose for the ekphrastic 

          poem she would write for the NC Museum of Art’s fiftieth anniversary.

          And Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez: Adagio. How it moved her pen.

          Bread and sliced apples, as well. Wet camellias. Crimson.

          These too: Mountain trails and lust for the fruit of life.

          And for all this, I remember her humility: 

          Such a quiet legacy. Her quiet leave-taking.

When she turned from oil painting to writing poetry in the 1960s, Julie became a rising star in our writing community, radiating love, reaching out to and encouraging emerging poets. A prominent reader and panelist across the state, she was also a major attraction for local events sponsored by Charlotte Poetry Review (AJ Jillani and Lisa ) and Independence Boulevard (M. Scott Douglass and Jill). She read with beginning and emerging poets in parks, at street festivals, and in La-tea-da’s tea room. Every beginning writer should be blessed with an advocate/mentor like Julie Suk. If you went to her book signings, she’d ask how your work was going and/or offer an encouraging word. She paid attention to and celebrated others.

In 2004 the grassroots advisory committee for CPCC’s Spring Literary Festival established the Irene Blair Honeycutt Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in the Literary Arts. While I was not involved in that decision, I did oversee discussions the committee subsequently had as we wrestled with the challenge of selecting the inaugural recipient of the award. Julie Gaillard Suk, we decided, would set the highest bar for future recipients. 

Julie leaves us the gift of her poetry, described by reviewers as tough and elegant, haunting, elemental and wild. As is her spirit which also remains. Her poems sing like the stars we fix our eyes on as we mourn her quiet leave-taking. What follows, in her own words, is “The Music” from Astonished to Wake:

          In my next life I want the voice of a violin.

          Tell me what you’d like played

          and I’ll speak from the key of love and pain,

          how the living are echoes of the past,

          my grandmother staring into the darkness – as I do now,

          thinking of those I must leave.

          Talking into the night,

          we’ll hold sorrow up close and let it weep.

As Frye, Joseph, Dede, Judy, and Irene make clear in their statements, Julie was more than a gifted poet. She always valued friendship and community, and she took seriously her role as a mentor to the many poets she supported over the course of her long and productive life.  She will be missed, but through her poetry, she will continue to play a role in Storied Charlotte for years to come.