Emrys

…living on a farm near Old Fort, NC, in the
early part of the 20th century. It was among more than 130 entries of
original poetry, prose, and nonfiction submitted by writers across the 
country to the Humanities Council. Mill Creek Suite will appear in the winter-spring 2012 issue of North
 Carolina
 Conversations, the free biannual magazine of the North Carolina Humanities Council.
 Taylor receives a cash prize and support toward a week-long writer’s 
residency at Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities in Southern
 Pines.
Of Mill Creek Suite, Taylor says, “The lives depicted in the poems are
 like those of the people I came to know during the summers my family spent
 east of Asheville: strong, resilient, self-reliant, loving.” The 
inspiration for the poetry cycle came when a friend of Taylor’s told her a
story of a man’s weekly trips on foot from Old Fort to Ridgecrest to check 
on his widowed mother. She says, “The trip seemed epic to me.” She later 
learned that the story was inaccurate, but by that time, the two central
characters had “taken on lives of their own. I did what Faulkner said
 lucky writers get to do: follow the characters around and take notes.”

Born in Lake City, SC, Taylor is a graduate of Furman University, with an 
M.A. from UNC at Chapel Hill and a Ph.D. from the University of South 
Carolina. She has taught English in the public schools of North and South
 Carolina and at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, the University of Puerto
 Rico, the University of South Carolina, and Lander University and fort 
almost fourteen years taught the medical humanities to residents and 
faculty at the Greenville (SC) Hospital System, where she was a medical
 editor.

Taylor’s chapbook of poems, Stepping on Air, was published by Emrys Press 
in 2008. Her short stories have been published in The South Carolina Review and Sargasso, a Caribbean journal. Her poems have appeared in Appalachian
 Journal, Kalliope, Scribble, The South Carolina Review, Timber Creek 
Review, Chebacco: The Magazine of the Mount Desert Island Historical 
Society, Tar River Poetry, and New England Watershed and in several
 anthologies, including Pinesong, Mountain Time, A Millennial Sampler
 of South Carolina Poetry, and Contemporary  Appalachia, volume 3 of The 
Southern Poetry Anthology. She was a finalist in the 2006 Rita Dove
 Poetry Competition in Salem College’s Center for Women Writers 
International National Literary Awards and in 2008 was named honorable 
mention in the same competition. She lives in Greenville, SC.

This year’s distinguished Linda Flowers Literary Award selection committee 
included:

David Ford, WFDD producer and host of  Triad Arts Up Close;  Scott Owens, poet and Instructor and Visiting Writer at Catawba Valley Community College;  Steve Sumerford, assistant director at Greensboro Public Library; and independent historian, author, and attorney L. McKay Whatley.

Established in 2001, the Linda Flowers Literary Award celebrates outstanding writing that shows a deep connection to the people of North Carolina and illuminates in a vital way their distinctive stories and voices. The award is named for the author of Throwed Away: Failures of Progress in Eastern North Carolina. With the Linda Flowers Literary Award, the Council honors a humanist, professor, and former Council member who achieved the extraordinary despite extraordinary odds. The award recognizes those who care, as Flowers did, about writing truthfully and well and who believe, as she wrote, that the humanities are “equipment for living.”

Previous winning entries to the Linda Flowers Literary Award

The North Carolina Humanities Council is a statewide nonprofit and affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Humanities Council serves as an advocate for lifelong learning and thoughtful dialogue about all facets of human life. It facilitates the exploration and celebration of the many voices and stories of North Carolina’s cultures and heritage. In addition to grants and publications, the Council offers the Road Scholarship speakers bureau; the Let’s Talk About It  library discussion series; the traveling exhibition Museum on Main Street, in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution and rural communities statewide; the Teachers Institute, a professional development program for the state’s public school educators; and Literature and Medicine, a scholar-facilitated book discussion group for hospital staff to reflect on the larger mission of medicine.