Kathryn Stripling Byer

Kay ByerFormer Gov. Michael F. Easley appointed Kathryn Stripling Byer, of Cullowhee, to be North Carolina's poet laureate in 2005. As poet laureate, Ms. Byer serves as an ambassador of North Carolina literature, past and present. She succeeded Fred Chappell.

Byer also has received the Hanes Award for Poetry from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. 

Kathryn Stripling Byer's published books of poetry have won awards, including the Lamont Poetry Selection for Wildwood Flower, The Roanoke-Chowan and Brockman Campbell prizes for Black Shawl, and the Southern Independent Booksellers Association Award for Catching Light.

Coming to Rest: Poems (Paperback)

By Kathryn Stripling Byer
$16.95
ISBN-13: 9780807131350
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Published: Louisiana State University Press, 4/2006
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North Carolina's poet laureate engages the contradictions inherent in the act of coming home, exploring the step-by-step leaving and returning--and finding "home" transformed because of the journey.

Wildwood Flower: Poems (Paperback)

By Kathryn Stripling Byer
$16.95
ISBN-13: 9780807117712
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Published: Louisiana State University Press, 10/1992
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In WILDWOOD FLOWER, Kathryn Stripling Byer speaks through the fictional voice of a mountain woman named Alma, who lived in the Blue Ridge wilderness around the turn of the century. In narrative and lyric, Byer's poems sing a journey through solitude, capturing the spirit and the sound of mountain ballads and of the women who sang them, stitching bits and pieces of their hardscrabble lives into lasting patterns.

Catching Light: Poems (Paperback)

By Kathryn Stripling Byer
$16.95
ISBN-13: 9780807127704
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Published: Louisiana State University Press, 4/2002
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In CATCHING LIGHT, Kathryn Stripling Byer searches for the language of aging, for a way of confronting every woman's fear of looking in the mirror and seeing an old woman staring back. Inspired by a series of photographs entitled "Evelyn" -- which depicts a former artist's model in her declining years, still full of life and facing death with flair and wit -- Byer finds a voice to contemplate the enigmatic but inevitable process of growing old.

CATCHING LIGHT is a profound inquiry into aging and how one remarkable woman faces it, sings to it, mocks it, rebels against it, and ultimately embraces it.