On Monday, February 11 at 6pm, author (and Hub City Writers Project co-founder!) John Lane and poet Libby Bernardin will be reading from and signing their new works.
John Lane – The Father Box
Award-winning writer John Lane kept a box for many years of what was left from his father’s life up until he committed suicide in 1959 when John was five years old. In the box are letters, photos, objects, and papers comprising nearly everything John knows about his father.
The pieces suggest a man’s origins in rural North Carolina; they also document his service in a World War on another continent and trace his return home.
Two years ago, John loaned the box to photographer Rob McDonald and asked him to take it home and contemplate its contents through the lens of his camera. These are the photographs that Rob made and the poems and short essays John wrote.
This is a project about artifacts and memories. It is about what remains of lives that came before us, lives which set the path for our own.
John Lane teaches at Wofford College where is director of the college’s Goodall Environmental Studies Center. He is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including Coyotes Settle the South, Abandoned Quarry: New & Selected Poems, Fate Moreland’s Widow, Circling Home, and The Dead Father Poems. He has won numerous awards, including Poetry Book of the Year by Southeastern Independent Booksellers Alliance SIBA in 2012 for Abandoned Quarry. In 2014 he was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors. He, with his wife Betsy Teter, is one of the co-founders of the Hub City Writers Project.
Libby Bernardin – Stones Ripe for Sowing
Libby Bernardin has crafted a haunting collection from a life well lived and carefully examined. These stunning poems question and affirm while eschewing answers. They invite us to “step into doubt, that hard stone, / seed of spring, of water, of fire.” Firmly grounded in the natural world, Bernardin trains her gaze deep into our very nature and existence, addressing loss and grief, aging, wonder and joy, all the contradictions of our human existence, with language that is at once lyrical and precise. These poems celebrate the every day and the sacred. This is a collection that invites you to become “a new person emerging from this hard case, / a chrysalis with one wing out, trembling.” –Pat Riviere-Seel, author of Nothing Below but Air
Libby Bernardin’s first full collection is Stones Ripe for Sowing (Press 53, 2018). She has two chapbooks, The Book of Myth and Layers of Song. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals. In 2015, she won the SC Poetry Society Forum Prize. Her Poem “Transmigration,” winner of the NC Poetry of Witness Award and published in Pinesong, was nominated for a 2017 Pushcart Prize. She lives in Georgetown and is a Life Member of the Board of Governors of the South Carolina Academy of Authors. She co-facilitates the Tea & Poetry Series at Waccamaw Library in Pawleys Island.
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