{"id":2176,"date":"2020-03-10T14:31:03","date_gmt":"2020-03-10T18:31:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/?p=2176"},"modified":"2020-03-10T14:31:03","modified_gmt":"2020-03-10T18:31:03","slug":"patrice-gopo-tommy-tomlinson-and-sensoria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/blog\/2020\/03\/10\/patrice-gopo-tommy-tomlinson-and-sensoria\/","title":{"rendered":"Patrice Gopo, Tommy Tomlinson, and Sensoria"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One of the great strengths of Charlotte\u2019s community of writers is that it usually makes room for newcomers.\u00a0 Even in the 1950s, Harry Golden, a Jewish activist from New York City, found Charlotte to be a conducive place to pursue his writing career.\u00a0\u00a0 Nowadays, writers from many different places have set their roots in Charlotte, and Charlotte\u2019s cultural scene is richer as a result of this infusion of talent.\u00a0 Two notable examples are Patrice Gopo and Tommy Tomlinson.\u00a0 Both of these gifted writers will be showcased during the upcoming Sensoria Festival, Central Piedmont Community College\u2019s week-long cultural celebration that will take place from March 27 through April 5, 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Patrice Gopo\ntook a long and winding road on her journey to Charlotte.  The child of Jamaican immigrants, Gopo grew\nup in Anchorage, Alaska.  During her\nearly adult years, she spent time in South Africa, where she met her husband,\nbefore eventually moving to Charlotte about ten years ago.  Gopo draws on her unique background in her\nrich and highly personal essays.  She\naddresses such topics as race, immigration and religion in her essays, but she\nrelates these topics to events and people from her life.  Her essays have appeared in numerous national\npublications, including The New York Times\n<\/em>and The Washington Post.  <\/em> A\ncollection of her essays recently came out under the title All the Colors We Will See: \nReflections on Barriers, Brokenness, and Finding Our Way.  <\/em>For\nmore information about Gopo and her writings, please click on the following\nlink:  https:\/\/www.patricegopo.com\/home<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I recently\ncontacted Gopo and asked her about her connections to Charlotte.  Here is her response: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Almost a decade ago, I arrived in Charlotte. At the time,\nI couldn\u2019t begin to imagine what this city and the state of North Carolina\nwould mean to my writing life. Those were my beginning writing days, and I\ndiscovered a warm, welcoming, and vibrant writing community. It is here that I\nfound classes and conferences and connections. It is here, in Charlotte, that I\nfound people and organizations who believed in the value and importance of my\nwork and wanted to support me in my endeavors. People like Maureen Ryan Griffin\nwith Wordplay and Greg Collard at WFAE. And organizations like CharlotteLit,\nASC, and the NCArts Council. The Charlotte community has been a beautiful\nencouragement to my writing life, and I\u2019m thrilled to always include in my bio,\n\u201cPatrice lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Tommy Tomlinson\u2019s journey to Charlotte started in Brunswick,\nGeorgia. He grew up in a farmhouse on the outskirts of Brunswick.  He decided to pursue a career in journalism\nduring his junior year at the University of Georgia.  He started his career as a reporter in 1986\nwhen he joined The Augusta Chronicle. \n<\/em>In 1989, The Charlotte Observer <\/em>hired him as a reporter, and four\nyears later he became a feature writer specializing in popular music.  From 1997 to 2012, he wrote a prize-winning\ncolumn that appeared in The Charlotte Observer <\/em>three time a week.  Since then he has worked as a free-lance\nwriter for such publications as Esquire, Sports Illustrated <\/em>and Forbes<\/em>.  In 2019, Simon and Schuster published his\nmemoir titled The Elephant in the Room: \nOne Fat Man\u2019s Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America.  <\/em>For more information about Tomlinson and\nhis writings, please click on the following link:  http:\/\/tommytomlinson.com\/bio\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although Tomlinson\u2019s career as a free-lance writer has taken\nhim all over the country, he and his wife continue to live in Charlotte.  I recently contacted him about his\nconnections to Charlotte.  Here is his\nresponse:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ve been in Charlotte for 30 years, which I never would\nhave expected. Journalists often bounce around from one place to another,\nchasing better jobs. But I landed here in 1989 to work for the Charlotte\nObserver, and for the next 23 years that was the best home I could’ve asked\nfor. The paper let me stretch, try new things, build connections with readers.\nNow I’m lucky enough to work at WFAE, where they have been generous enough to\nlet me do a podcast even though I don’t exactly have an NPR voice. I’ve had to\ntravel a lot for work over the years, and besides having a great airport,\nCharlotte provides what I need — a stable, lovely, warm place to call home. My\nwife and I don’t plan to live anywhere else.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both Gopo and Tomlinson are participating in Sensoria this\nyear.  On March 30, 2020, Gopo will\ndiscuss All the Colors We Will See <\/em>at CPCC\u2019s Central Campus in Tate Hall\nat 10:30 a.m. and at CPCC\u2019s Cato Campus at 1:30 p.m.  Tomlinson will also speak on March 30,\n2020.  His talk, which is titled \u201cOn\nJournalism and Writing:  A Conversation\nwith Tommy Tomlinson,\u201d will take place at CPCC\u2019s Central Campus in Tate Hall at\n12:30 p.m.  For a full schedule of events\nassociated with Sensoria, please click on the following link:  https:\/\/sensoria.cpcc.edu\/events\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In recent years, Sensoria has established itself as one of\nCharlotte\u2019s premier cultural events.  CPCC\u2019s\nSensoria is a free weeklong festival at CPCC\u2019s campuses, open both to students\nand to the public. It’s really quite extraordinary how much the festival offers\neach year, including not just literature but art and design, history and\nculture, leadership and service, and science and technology. For literary\nevents, the festival includes local and regional authors, such as Gopo and\nTomlinson, and always a major national writer brought as an Irene Blair\nHoneycutt Distinguished Lecturer\u2014this year it\u2019s US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo.\nOther renowned poets and writers have included Tracy K. Smith, George Saunders,\nAmy Bloom, Natasha Trethewey, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Mary Oliver. The festival\nalso honors local and regional writers with the Irene Blair Honeycutt Award for\nlifetime literary achievement and service to the literary community.  Sensoria provides a wonderful opportunity for\nstudents and the community to engage with literature and the arts.  There can be no doubt that Sensoria makes an\nimportant contribution to storied Charlotte. \n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the great strengths of Charlotte\u2019s community of writers is that it usually makes room for newcomers.\u00a0 Even in the 1950s, Harry Golden, a Jewish activist from New York City, found Charlotte to be a conducive place to pursue his writing career.\u00a0\u00a0 Nowadays, writers from many different places have set their roots in Charlotte, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[26,25,29,27,30,28,24,7],"class_list":["post-2176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-storied-charlotte","tag-art-and-design","tag-charlotte-writers","tag-festival","tag-history-and-culture","tag-literary-events","tag-regional-authors","tag-sensoria","tag-writers"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2176"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2181,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2176\/revisions\/2181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}