Shelby Stephenson

Poet Laureate of North Carolina, of North Carolina, 2014-2016

SHELBY STEPHENSON was the eighth Poet Laureate of North Carolina and lives on the small farm where he was born near Benson, in the Coastal Plain of North Carolina. “Most of my poems come out of that background,” he says, “where memory and imagination play on one another.” Educated at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he is professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina-Pembroke, and served as editor of the international literary journal Pembroke Magazine from 1979 until his retirement in 2010. His awards include the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Memorial Award, North Carolina Network Chapbook Prize, Bright Hill Press Chapbook Award, and the Brockman-Campbell Poetry Prize. He has published a poetic documentary Plankhouse (with photographs by Roger Manley), plus ten chapbooks. Family Matters: Homage to July, the Slave Girl won the 2008 Bellday Poetry Prize, and the 2009 Oscar Arnold Young Award. The state of North Carolina presented Shelby with the 2001 North Carolina Award in Literature, and in 2014 he was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. 

Stephenson works his magic in some intriguing, impressive and sometimes surprising formal structures, and he adds new images, insights, and details to his own biography. Slavery and Freedom on Paul’s Hill compresses time and stitches memory to the soil and its history as it covers Stephenson’s "little postage stamp of native soil" with a veil of compassion, pain, humor, and hope. —Alex Albright, founding editor, North Carolina Literary Review

Shelby Stephenson’s rhapsodic, kaleidoscopic Our World testifies both to the blessings of longevity and to the frailties of age—both to the joys of long memory and to the facts of forgetting. In these poems, past and present are equally vivid. —Robert M. West, editor of The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons

In seriousness, humor, economy of language, Stephenson demonstrates respect and affection for the spoken word, and he somehow gets it all in—every atom of his being—lifting the reader above the illusion of reality and beguiling us with an inescapable intimacy. Elegies for Small Game is a collection of uncommon excellence. —Stephen E. Smith, author of A Short Report on the Fire at Woolworths

“Where is the word that holds ALL I am trying to say?” asks Shelby Stephenson in the Prologue to Fiddledeedee. He unleashes a poetic answer that plays and keens, singing its long journey home, immersing us in the living language of a place, the East Carolina flatlands. With three-line stanzas, often breathtaking, Stephenson leads us through the lay of his ancestral land. He gives voice to his place and its people and does so unashamedly, with passion and precision, and, yes, with real country music. — Kathryn Stripling Byer, Poet Laureate of North Carolina, 2005-2009