Shelby Stephenson Shares His Award-Winning Poetry Collection
Family Matters: Homage to July, the Slave Girl
On UNC-TV’s North Carolina Bookwatch, Sunday, November 29, at 5 PM

In 2008, the distinguished poet Allen Grossman selected Shelby Stepheson’s Family Matters: Homage to July, the Slave Girl as the winner of the Bellday Poetry Prize. Prof. Grossman called the Benson, NC, native’s winning entry “an intense and heart-breaking poetic narrative which, in its exploration of historical and personal materials, holds affinities to the work of Susan Howe and to James Agee's classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Family Matters is a strenuous questioning and exposure of the fictions of ownership, whether of persons or places, graves or farms.”

In an all-new episode of UNC-TV’s local literary series North Carolina Bookwatch with D.G. Martin, premiering Sunday, November 29, at 5 PM, Stephenson shares his latest collection of poems examining slaves, slave owners and slave owning in North Carolina.

Shelby Stephenson grew up on a small farm near Benson, in the Coastal Plain of North Carolina. After leaving the farm for college, he graduated from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is professor of English at the University of North Carolina-Pembroke, where he has edited Pembroke Magazine since 1979. The state of North Carolina presented him with the 2001 North Carolina Award in Literature. He has received the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Memorial Award, North Carolina Writers’ Network Chapbook Prize, Bright Hill Press Chapbook Award, and the Brockman-Campbell Poetry Prize. In addition to Family Matters: Homage to July, the Slave Girl, he has published a poetic documentary Plankhouse (with photographs by Roger Manley), Middle Creek Poems, Carolina Shout!, Finch’s Mash, The Persimmon Tree Carol, Poor People, Greatest Hits, Fiddledeedee, and Possum. With his wife Linda he has made three musical CDs Hank Williams Tribute; Stephenson Brothers & Linda Sing the Old Songs; When Country Was Country. Shelby and Linda live on the farm where he was born.

Don’t miss D.G. Martin’s all-new interview with Shelby Stephenson on North Carolina Bookwatch, Sunday, November 29, at 5 PM, only on UNC-TV!

During the 26-week season of North Carolina Bookwatch, guests will also include:  John Shelton Reed and Dale Volberg Reed (Holy Smoke), Justin Catanoso (My Cousin the Saint), Todd Johnson (The Sweet By and By), Michael Walden (North Carolina in the Connected Age), Barbara Fredrickson (Positivity), Michael Davis (Street Gang), Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational), Howard Lee (The Courage to Lead), Marianne Gingher (Adventures in Pen Land), Dan Barefoot (Hark the Sound of Tar Heel Voices), John Hart (The Last Child),  Elizabeth Edwards (Resilience), Brett Friedlander (Chasing Moonlight),  Michael Malone (The Four Corners of the Sky), John Kessel (The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories), Reynolds Price (Ardent Spirits), Alexandra Sokoloff (The Unseen), Barry Popkin (The World is Fat), Erica Eisdorfer (The Wet Nurse’s Tale), and Kate Betterton (Where the Lake Becomes the River).

For additional information about series guests and airdates, plus links to Bookwatch on Facebook, please visit: www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch.

Funding for North Carolina Bookwatch is provided by UNC-TV members and by Quail Ridge Books and Music, Raleigh’s independent, full service bookstore, bringing readers and writers together since 1984.

North Carolina Bookwatch is part of UNC-TV’s ongoing commitment to produce programs for and about North Carolina. UNC-TV is the statewide 11-station broadcast network of the University of North Carolina. For more information, please visit www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch.

For more information about North Carolina Bookwatch and UNC-TV’s other original productions, please visit our website at www.unctv.org.

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