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NC Poet Laureate Lectured at YHC
She travels, writes celebratory poems for special events, is mentor to other writers, hosts a poetry page on www.ncarts.org, and gives lectures on poetry. Kay was featured at the annual Reece Lecture on Tuesday, April 1 at Young Harris College. Several students attended her poetry reading in the Susan B. Harris Chapel. During a question/ answer session, Kay said she is inspired by her family and the landscape of Appalachia to craft her poetry. Born and reared in Camilla, Georgia, where her family farmed for several generations, Kay moved to Cullowhee, North Carolina in 1968. She taught at Western Carolina University and served as Poetin Residence until her recent retirement. Kay is married to Jim Byer, who recently retired as head of the English department at Western Carolina University. They have one daughter, Corinna, who is also a writer. Kay's mother still lives in Camilla, Georgia. Most of Kay's work focuses on the women of Appalachia. In her poetry book, CATCHING LIGHT, Kay searches for the language of aging. Grandmothers and ghosts move through her lyrics full of life and face death with flair and wit. The poem, "Cold Spell," speaks of her childhood and contrasts the sharpness of life with death: I remember the stove's black belly we huddled beside that afternoon, the three of us, two old and one young, the wind whistling round the house. It's the sharp corners make it sing, my grandmother said, the sharp edges… Kay said she started writing poetry because it gave her more voice than fiction. "It seemed to be tugging at me, pulling at me much more strongly than the fiction. "Everybody's poetry starts somewhere," she said. "Most Southern poets begin with a tie to place, being part of a landscape." According to James Applewhite, "The poems of Kathryn Stripling Byer's BLACK SHAWL, like migratory birds, carry a legacy of Highland ballads through the New World Appalachians, to startle and delight us with their intensely lyrical mystery of origins. Byer's haunting wildness and sorrow become a new still ancient-seeming lonelier and lovelier voice in the American mountains." Besides writing BLACK SHAWL and CATCHING LIGHT, Kay is author of THE GIRL IN THE MIDST OF THE HARVEST; WILDWOOD FLOWER, winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and COMING TO REST. She's the recipient of the 2001 North Carolina Award in Literature, the Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Prize, Brockman-Campbell Award and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. In Kay's book, COMING TO REST, seamless lines of poetry weave together experiences as a daughter and a mother, the challenges of aging, the dignity of domestic life, and learning to let go while holding fast to what matters all the while. She explores step-bystep leaving and returning and finding "home".
Finally, here's an excerpt from Kathryn (Kay) Stripling Byer's poem, "Here": …Because of those windows where every night I watched the skyfield on fire dying out, cloud by cloud, into darkness, I came to these mountains where sky huddles over the Balsams and lingers awhile every morning as mist lifting off weeds clasping the edges of Cullowhee Creek. Over thirty years I've watched the way light begins here. It still wakes me up. Lets me be. Here. Where I am.
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