Celebrating Appalachian Voices at Scuppernong Books

Celebrating Appalachian Voices: Local Poets Share Work on Gender, Nature, and Identity

Join Maeve Fox and Narya Rose Deckard at Scuppernong Books for their double poetry reading Sunday, June 8^th at 2:00pm. The event is free and open to the public. Copies of their collections, Letting Go of Me and Wolfcraft, respectively, will be available for purchase and signing.

Fox is a native of Western North Carolina and has been writing poetry for over 20 years. She, like many people did, transitioned in 2020 during the COVID pandemic, and has been adjusting to her new life ever since. She is a mediator at a non-profit.  Letting Go of Me is her debut poetry collection.

Hickory poet and professor, Scott Owens, says that Fox provides “luscious details of a life lived and felt deeply: grits and butter, crazy-ass birds, man cards, houses larger on the inside, kudzu, flowered dresses, and all one might need to feel and understand the love, loss, appreciation, growth, continuity, change and acceptance conveyed by these poems.”

Jay Orlando, author of A Tangled Lineage, says she “takes the trans experience into the Appalachians, wraps the pride flag around a hot bowl of grits (with butter!), and practices a hard earned self-acceptance and self-love that rural LGBTQ+ people need now more than ever. She has set her table with all the mismatched dishes and mason jars and memories, and invited us all to join her there, sit, and share a meal of poetry. Accepting her invitation will leave the reader all the richer for having done so.”

Deckard is winner of Broken Tribe Press's MFA Graduate Award and has had poems published in Tiny Seed, Dead Mule, Eternal Haunted Summer, Kakalak, and other literary journals. She teaches writing at Lenoir Rhyne University. Wolfcraft is her debut poetry collection.

Playing off of the content of some of her poems, Hickory poet and professor, Scott Owens, says of Deckard, "Maybe not so much a woman who knows something more but one who notices more, one who pays attention, one who listens to her intuition, hears better by listening to flowers tended by hands long turned into the flowers they tended, making her ink a conduit for silenced voices, giving language to knowledge that defies language, each line a sensory delight, each word in touch with truth on all the levels we've ever known."

NC Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Greene comments, "'Wolfcraft' howls the alphabet into full lettered meadows with poetics inscribed on 'the slow tongue of bone,' delivering an intentional unfettered sensibility of craft embodied in voice that is decidedly female inside the beauty and juxtapositions of the natural world. This collection of poetry offers interrogations of vulnerability that are unapologetic reincarnations of celebration."