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McCullers Center and CSU Film Production Program
Produce Documentary Trailer
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The McCullers Center, in collaboration with the English Department of Columbus State University, the Film Production program in CSU's Department of Communication, and the CSU Schwob School of Music's Recording Studio, has embarked on the creation and production of a feature-length documentary film about Carson McCullers. No such film has ever been produced, and the opportunity to collaborate with other CSU entities to pursue such a project makes the timing seem fortunate. The collaborators received a $3,500 seed grant from the CSU Provost's Office to produce a two-minute trailer to enhance their application for a $500,000 NEH Production Grant. The trailer was shot in May at the Smith-McCullers House, at two locations in downtown Columbus, and one location in the Columbus Historic District. The trailer features CSU Theatre student Jordyn Braaten as the adult Carson and Edie Getz, daughter of CSU film professor Bruce Getz, as the child Carson. The story of Carson "producing" plays in the front parlor of the Smith-McCullers House is reproduced in the trailer, with Dr. Getz's wife and two other children serving as Carson's mother Beebe, her brother Lamar Jr., and her sister Rita. Other elements of the trailer include B-Roll footage of McCullers artifacts in the Smith-McCullers House, archival photographs, segments from filmed interviews by Dan Griffin conducted in the early 2000s with famous personages and others who knew Carson well, audio clips from the Carson McCullers Center's Weekly We of Me podcast, and footage from the home movie shot by Helen Harvey of Carson and Reeve's wedding at her family's Stark Avenue home in September 1937. Film Program faculty members Adam Bova (producer), Bruce Getz (director), and Chris Robinson (director of photography) have involved a number of Film Production students in the work, allowing them to earn hands-on experience. This summer, the team will continue polishing the trailer, revising the already completed draft of the grant application, and submitting the final draft in mid-August.
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Snowden Wright Named 17th Annual Writing Fellow
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The Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians is proud to announce that novelist Snowden Wright is the winner of the 17th annual Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellowship for Writers. As the fellowship recipient, Wright will live and work in Carson McCullers’s childhood home, the Smith-McCullers House, in Columbus, Georgia, in the fall.
Snowden Wright is the author of the novel American Pop, a Wall Street Journal WSJ+ Book of the Month, selection for Barnes & Noble’s “Discover Great New Writers” program, Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Okra Pick, and NPR Favorite Book of the Year. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Columbia University, he has written for The Atlantic, Salon, Esquire, The Millions, and the New York Daily News, among other publications, and previously worked as a fiction reader at The New Yorker, Esquire, and The Paris Review.
Wright was awarded a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the 2018 Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and his debut novel, Play Pretty Blues, won the 2012 Summer Literary Seminars’ Graywolf Prize. Recipient of proclamations from Batesville and Meridian, Mississippi, he has been granted residencies and fellowships by Yaddo, Escape to Create, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Stone Court, Monson Arts, and the Hambidge Center. Wright lives in Yazoo County, Mississippi, where he is at work on his third novel, forthcoming from HarperCollins.
Named in honor of Carson's parents, The Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellowship for Writers was inspired by McCullers's experience at the Breadloaf Writer's Conference in Vermont and, especially, the Yaddo Arts Colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. To honor the contribution of these residency fellowships to McCullers's work, the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians awards fellowships for writers to spend time in McCullers's childhood home in Columbus, Georgia. The fellowships are intended to afford the writers in residence uninterrupted time to dedicate to their work, free from the distractions of daily life and other professional responsibilities.
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McCullers Center Hosts Award-Winning Poets
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The McCullers Center presented a Georgia Poetry Circuit virtual reading by Paisley Rekdal on Tuesday, February 8, via Zoom. This event was free and open to the public.
Paisley Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee; the hybrid photo-text memoir, Intimate; and five books of poetry: A Crash of Rhinos; Six Girls Without Pants; The Invention of the Kaleidoscope; Animal Eye, a finalist for the 2013 Kingsley Tufts Prize and winner of the UNT Rilke Prize; and Imaginary Vessels, finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Prize and the Washington State Book Award. Her newest work of nonfiction is a book-length essay, The Broken Country: On Trauma, a Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam. A new collection of poems, Nightingale, which re-writes many of the myths in Ovid's The Metamorphoses, was published spring 2019. Appropriate: A Provocation, which examines cultural appropriation, was published by W.W. Norton in Feb. 2021. Her work has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Residency, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes (2009, 2013), Narrative's Poetry Prize, the AWP Creative Nonfiction Prize, and various state arts council awards. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The New Republic, Tin House, the Best American Poetry series (2012, 2013, 2017, 2018, 2019), and on National Public Radio, among others.
On Monday, April 4, the McCullers Center hosted a Georgia Poetry Circuit virtual reading by Lauren K. Alleyne via Zoom (see link below). This event was also free and open to the public!
Lauren K. Alleyne is the author of two collections of poetry, Difficult Fruit (Peepal Tree Press 2014), and Honeyfish (New Issues & Peepal Tree, 2019), and co-editor of Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (Northwestern, 2020). Her work has appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times, The Atlantic, Ms. Muse, Tin House, and Guernica, among others. Her most recent honors include a 2020 NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Poetry, and the longlist for the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. She is currently an associate professor of English at James Madison University, and the assistant director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, where she also serves as editor-in-chief of the center's online journal, The Fight & The Fiddle. More information is available at www.laurenkalleyne.com.
Founded at Mercer University in 1985, the Georgia Poetry Circuit is a consortium of ten Georgia colleges and universities working together to bring three poets of national and international reputation annually to all members’ campuses, providing an important access to the literary arts for Georgia residents across the state. At each school, each Circuit poet gives a free and open reading of his/her work. Visiting poets also meet with creative writing students at each campus for workshops, talks, or extended question and answer sessions. In addition to the opportunity to hear work from diverse writers of national and international reputation, the Circuit events provide Georgia students with an immensely valuable educational opportunity for interaction with many of the best contemporary poets in the United States. Recent GPC poets include Adrian Matejka, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Sholeh Wolpe, Kevin Prufer, and Kim Addonizio.
The Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians has sponsored CSU's participation in the Georgia Poetry Circuit for 17 years, and during that time, in addition to giving readings and making appearances on the CSU campus, visiting poets have stayed at the Smith-McCullers House and met with students and faculty there.
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McCullers Center Events Support CSU and High School
Creative Writing Students
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Part of the McCullers Center’s mission is “nurturing writers and musicians” and “educating young people.” In pursuit of that mission the Center offers a wide range of programming, including the annual Carson McCullers Literary Awards, which offers prizes in fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, playwriting, screenwriting, and formal essay through two parallel competitions, one for high school students from Georgia and Alabama, one for students at CSU. This year saw the largest number of submissions ever, especially from high school students. The virtual awards ceremony was held on Saturday, February 19 (Carson’s 105th birthday) and over $7,000 in prize money—all from private contributors—was awarded.
In May, former CSU creative writing student and current Shaw High School English teacher Wytinsea Jones brought the members of the school’s creative writing club—for which Jones serves as the faculty sponsor—to the Smith-McCullers House for a tour of the famous writer’s childhood home and a creative writing workshop session with Center director and CSU creative writing faculty member Nick Norwood. It was a fieldtrip for the students, a chance for them to get better acquainted with Carson McCullers’s life and work, and a chance to further develop their writing skills.
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Roger Williams University Highlights McCullers's
Life and Work, Hosts Panel Discussion
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The Roger Williams University Library's annual exhibition honoring a single widely acclaimed author focused this year on Carson McCullers. In addition to the exhibition--with student fellows assisting with archival research and curation--the program provided for a community reading group and related activities with RWU's local public library and a keynote lecture/discussion. RWU faculty member Adam Braver, along with two student winners of the annual fellowship, came to Columbus in October to tour the Smith-McCullers House, visit the CSU Archives, and explore the city that had been the birthplace and childhood home of Carson McCullers. On March 1, RWU hosted a panel discussion--available via Zoom--on the life and work of McCullers. Participants on the panel included, along with Professor Braver, McCullers Center Founding Director and preeminent McCullers Scholar Dr. Carlos Dews, current McCullers Center Director Nick Norwood--who moderated the discussion--famed Hollywood actress and director of the McCullers short story film adaptation "A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud." Karen Allen, and Jenn Shapland, author of National Book Award finalist My Autobiography of Carson McCullers.
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McCullers Center Receives Gift
of Henry Varnum Poor Charcoal Study
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The McCullers Center recently received word of an upcoming gift from longtime patron and advisory board member Dr. Thornton Jordan: a charcoal study by Henry Varnum Poor for his portrait of Carson McCullers. The portrait, which originally belonged to Dr. Mary Mercer and hung in her house in Grand View on Hudson, is currently on display in the front parlor of the Smith-McCullers House in Columbus. A reproduction of the portrait hangs in the front room of the main floor apartment in the Carson McCullers House in Nyack. Dr. Jordan is currently having reproductions of the charcoal study made for display in both houses. The original will be placed in the Archives at Columbus State University. The McCullers Center wishes to join the entire McCullers community in thanking Dr. Jordan for this marvelous gift.
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Archived Newsletters Now Available
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All of our past newsletters are now accessible on our website at www.mccullerscenter.org! Just click on the “Newsletter” tab and then choose the issue you want to read.
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It’s the start of summer and things are heating up in more ways than one. The documentary film project—the first ever feature-length documentary about Carson McCullers—feels well underway, renovations are beginning at the Smith-McCullers House, repair work is being planned for the Carson McCullers House in Nyack, grant applications are in process to help fund the production of the documentary and the premier of an original opera based on The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by composer Robert Chumbley and librettist and CSU creative writing professor Carey Scott Wilkerson, and the McCullers Center has received a grant from the Columbus Cultural Arts Alliance to co-host with the Chattahoochee Valley Libraries writer/cartoonist The Bui, whose graphic memoir The Best We Could Do about her family’s flight from war-torn Vietnam in 1975 is an NEA Big Read selection and will be the Libraries’ Community Read in the coming year. Thi Bui will headline the Carson McCullers Literary Festival, to be held on the Main Stage of CSU’s Riverside Theatre Complex on Friday and Saturday, February 17 and 18, 2023. And finally, novelist Snowden Wright has been named the 17th annual Marguerite and Lamar Smith Writing Fellow and will arrive in Columbus on September 1 to begin a three-month residency in the Smith-McCullers House. Amid all of this, the McCullers Center is embarking on a major fundraising campaign with the help of consultant Johanna Gurland. Our goal is to establish several new endowments: for the position of director, maintenance of the two homes, and future programming, including residency fellowships at the Carson McCullers House in Nyack. We will also resume our regular programming in the fall, including a reception for Snowden Wright at the Smith-McCullers House, more Georgia Poetry Circuit events on CSU’s Main Campus, and David Diamond Reading & Recital events at the Bo Bartlett Center. Please stay tuned for announcements about dates and times for those events. We look forward to seeing you there. Meanwhile, have a great summer!
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