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2019
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
Carolina Chapel Hill. The way he speaks of his students, it is clear he’s enjoyed his time in the classroom and still favors old school techniques, including use of the blackboard, which gets its own module. He collects postcards from alums as they travel the world, and he displays them in
his office. Like the chapters named for the elements of a book, these essays range from “Handouts” to “Homework” to “Office Hours,” but perhaps the best is “Gradebook,” where McFee extolls the virtues of the Riggs’ 18 – Week College Record gradebook. On the heels of earlier
laments concerning the dying art of letter writing, correspondence, and the fading rewards and joys of the daily trip to the mailbox, the author may seem like a Luddite at heart. He meets that assumption head on in the preface, once again with a nice turn of phrase:
MICHAEL MCFEE, A STROKE OF LUCK FOR NORTH CAROLINA adapted from event program biography by Michele Walker “To have been born here was a real stroke of luck as a writer.” —Michael McFee
PHOTOGRAPH BY LINDA FOX; COURTESY OF NC DEPT. OF NATURAL AND CULTURAL RESOURCES
Asheville native Michael McFee was raised in south Buncombe County, where he spent his first eighteen years playing baseball, hiking, and camping along the Blue Ridge Parkway, soaking up the places, people, and language that would later inform his acclaimed poetry. As a student at UNC Chapel Hill, McFee earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English and began writing poetry. The author of sixteen books, McFee has published eleven collections of poems, among them Plain Air (1983), Vanishing Acts (1989), To See (with photographer Elizabeth Matheson, 1991), Shinemaster (2006), and We Were Once Here (2017). He is the author of two collections of essays, most recently Appointed Rounds (2018), and the editor of several anthologies of North Carolina literature, including The Language They Speak Is Things to Eat: Poems by Fifteen Contemporary North Carolina Poets
ABOVE Michael McFee receiving the North Carolina Award for Literature from Governor Roy Cooper and Susi Hamilton, Secretary of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, Raleigh, 16 Nov. 2018 (For more information about Michael McFee, watch the video created for this occasion.)
MICHELE WALKER is Public Information Officer at the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.