A. R. Ammons has called Shelby Stephenson "the poet par excellence of the distinctive culture of Southeastern North Carolina. He sings the moods of the mockingbird, ditch bank, tobacco field with an accuracy and fullness unavailable elsewhere, saving a way of life for us even as it is passing." Shelby Stephenson in Plankhouse focuses on growing up on the coastal plains of eastern North Carolina in the 1940s and 1950s. He describes the rapidly disappearing rural life in a series of short, intensely visualized sketches. Photographer Roger Manley uses a wide-angle panoramic camera to photograph the flat, limited vistas of the coastal plains that provided the context for Stephenson's vignettes. The resulting book balances image and word.

Plankhouse

Stephenson, Shelby

North Carolina Wesleyan

A. R. Ammons has called Shelby Stephenson "the poet par excellence of the distinctive culture of Southeastern North Carolina. He sings the moods of the mockingbird, ditch bank, tobacco field with an accuracy and fullness unavailable elsewhere, saving a way of life for us even as it is passing."Shelby Stephenson in Plankhouse focuses on growing up on the coastal plains of eastern North Carolina in the 1940s and 1950s. He describes the rapidly disappearing rural life in a series of short, intensely visualized sketches.Photographer Roger Manley uses a wide-angle panoramic camera to photograph the flat, limited vistas of the coastal plains that provided the context for Stephenson's vignettes. The resulting book balances image and word.

Plankhouse: Poems and Photographs

Literature & Fiction

Manley, Roger

Poetry

The Hunger of Freedom sings history, 19th century and 20th century, with distinct cadence. The author, Shelby Stephenson explores family, ancestors, ghosts and landscape with razor-sharp clarity. This detailed collection of affecting poems depicts a sense of place and the slaves who toiled there.

The Hunger of Freedom

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

A freezing cold winter day, a disemboweled 250-pound hog hangs over a vat of hot water in the farmyard. The carcass will be scalded and scraped clean. A few neighbors have come to help and the women are already cleaning the chitterlings that will encase the sausage made from meat scraps.Making sausage was my favorite part of the day. After the meat has been ground, then comes the seasoning: salt, red pepper, and sage from a nearby bush. The women mix it, then fry up a few "try pieces." "Needs more salt," one woman will say. "More pepper," says another. "You need a little more heat in there." The samples are passed around to get everyone's opinion-even a child's if I'm lucky because with so much going on, I've long since run off my lunch.In Shelby's Lady: The Hog Poems, Shelby Stephenson has captured all the hard and often dirty work that goes into prepping and preserving a slaughtered pig before refrigerators were common. I remember salting the hams, drying the links of sausage or rendering the fat for lard. Shelby shows us again a way of life that has almost completely disappeared.-Margaret Maron

Shelby's Lady: The Hog Poems

Biographies & Memoirs

Professionals & Academics

Fernwood Press

In Elegies for Small Game , Shelby Stephenson continues his celebration of place, family, and memory. But here there is a new eloquence and authority of rhyme and ballad form, with laments for those who have gone on, and odes to hunting dogs, songs for game like possums and rabbits, a gallery of portraits of people and loved pets, and even imaginary pets of childhood. In poem after poem Stephenson catches the exuberance of childhood, the romance of hot-rods, the delight of barnyard basketball, and the poignant poetry of birdlife in the countryside. In dialogue and hymn, this singer and laureate meditates on issues of race, history, and the bonds of abiding love. -Robert Morgan

Elegies for Small Game

Press 53

Former North Carolina Poet Laureate Shelby Stephenson lives on the same plot of land in Eastern North Carolina where he was born, across the road from his family cemetery that includes the unmarked graves of slaves, some he has come to know through documents and stories handed down through the generations. In Slavery and Freedom on Paul's Hill, Stephenson shares family stories and history while he struggles to understand and come to terms with a family past that incudes owning other human beings, including July the Slave Girl, whose story haunts him to this day.

Slavery and Freedom on Paul's Hill

More

Literary

Redhawk Publications

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Books by Stephenson, Shelby