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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
Winter 2023
CELEBRATING, FINALLY, THE 2020 NORTH CAROLINA LITERARY HALL OF FAME INDUCTEES
“revered, inspirational, life-changing teacher” Anthony Abbott
In the pages that follow, read e xc e r p t s f r o m the remarks of the various presenters. Consider also reading the work of these and the other writers in the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. And then, go out and find a writer from your part of North Carolina to read. (We have no doubt you can). Find out why 2004 Hall of Fame inductee Doris Betts described North Carolina as “the writingest state” and why NCLR proudly preserves in our pages the rich literary culture of this state. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
The induction ceremony for the 2020 inductees into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame was worth the wait for a safer time to gather to celebrate. October 16, 2022 was warm and clear in Southern Pines, NC, and the crowd sitting under the tent behind the Weymouth Center were in for a treat. The crowd enjoyed stirring speeches as Anthony Abbott and Max Steele were inducted posthumously. Two former North Carolina Poets Laureate spoke about and read from Abbott’s work. Steele was lauded by UNC Chapel Hill’s Director of the Creative Writing program, a position Steele held for twenty years. Carole Boston Weatherford was inducted in absentia by a writer influenced by her and then her work read by her son and daughter-in-law. Family members also inducted Charles Frazier (his daughter, also a writer) and Bland Simpson (his wife and collaborator).
JOSEPH BATHANTI was Poet Laureate of North Carolina from 2012 to 2014 and the 2016 recipient of the North Carolina Award for Literature. He is Professor of English and McFarlane Family Distinguished Professor of Interdisciplinary Education and Writer-in-Residence of Appalachian State University’s Watauga
Residential College in Boone, NC. The author of nineteen books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, his newest book, Light at the Seam (Louisiana State University Press, 2022), received the Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Prize from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association.
induction remarks by Joseph Bathanti
COURTESY OF THE NORTH CAROLINA WRITERS’ NETWORK
Anthony S. Abbott graduated from Princeton, then Harvard, where he received his PhD, and, in 1964, joined the faculty at Davidson College. He was named Charles A. Dana Professor of English in 1990 and served as Department Chair from 1989 to 1996. Recipient of Davidson’s Thomas Jefferson Award and the Hunter-Hamilton Love of Teaching Award, a revered, inspirational, life-changing teacher, he has launched scores of writers and scholars. I do not exaggerate when I say Tony Abbott remains a legend beloved at Davidson College and in the town of Davidson. In 1976, I, and my not-yet-wife wife, Joan, arrived in North Carolina as VISTA Volunteers, assigned to the same prison project. My post was Huntersville Prison in North Mecklenburg County. Davidson College had a prisoner advocacy group, including Tony. He’d been collaborating with a prisoner named Vernon Rich on a series of columns for a small local newspaper. Tony was one of the very first people Joan and I met upon our arrival, and we place him among a handful of our dearest, oldest friends – and by extension his wife Susan, his sons, and his grandchildren. I lusted to be a writer, and Tony – already established among the
writers I would come to know and love across the state – not only modeled what that looked like, but took me, a perfect stranger, under his wing. My initial impressions of Tony continue to characterize him, lo, these forty-six-plus years later: loving, indefatigable, inexplicably in several places at once, privileging everyone ahead of himself, consummate family man, supremely gifted writer and teacher, powerfully committed to social and restorative justice. It’s obvious from his work, especially the novels, that he lived his boyhood so intensely that he remains, for those of us blessed to have known him, forever young. He had the guts, stamina, and talent to reinvent himself on a whim; and, in perhaps his most dazzling sleight of hand, shape-shifted from a distinguished, very fine poet into a distinguished, very fine novelist. Tony’s linked bildungsromans, Leaving Maggie Hope and The Three Great Secret Things, have the compression and lyric grace, and narrative mastery