The Harlan Joel Gradin Award for Excellence in the Public Humanities from The North Carolina Humanities Council

I founded and produced Asheville Wordfest from 2008-2019. The festival’s mission was to present poets from an array of cultural contexts in an effort to bring the divided cultures of this city together. Galway Kinnell, Li-Young Lee, Natasha Tretheway, Raul Zurita, Ross Gay, Quincy Troupe, Valzhyna Mort, Richard Chess, Kathryn. Stripling Byer, Flying Words Project, David Whyte, Patricia Smith, and Glenis Redmond are among the presenting poets. My development of the festival earned me the inaugural Harlan Joel Gradin Award for Excellence in the Public Humanities. Harlan Gradin was my mentor when I first conceived the idea. For decades since, he has remained my champion, my challenger, and my great friend.

The Poet Laureate of the Blue Ridge Parkway

Before The Soul Tree went to press, a number of honors came my way from mysterious origins. Explore Asheville asked my permission to place a few lines on wayfinding signs (“What you take from her is mapless.”) It won the Okra Pick Award from SIBA. Most astonishingly, it earned me the title of The Poet Laureate of the Blue Ridge Parkway as part of the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation’s 75th Anniversary of the Parkway Celebration. It was at the time the only laureateship for a bioregion.

Founding Co-Coordinator of Thomas Wolfe MFA at Lenoir-Rhyne University

I am the founding coordinator of the Thomas Wolfe MFA at Lenoir-Rhyne University. I had long dreamt of leading a Creative Writing program that prioritized student well-being. Since 2013, I and my colleagues have reframed Creative Writing workshops as non-toxic communities of care and trust. I learned how to use “appreciations” from my Storytelling mentor, Connie Regan-Blake. I now share coordination responsibilities with author, Dale Bailey.

Raymond A. Bost Distinguished Professor Award

In 2020, I was awarded this immensely meaningful award and earned the title of “Distinguished Professor.” As you see on my Teaching page, my path to being a professor has been an unusual one. I was a teacher first. This holds great meaning to me, which the letters my students wrote in nominating me reflect. Having taught in ten or so unique environments (from a village school in Jamaica to a medium-security prison) taught me that everybody can learn if the teacher cares enough. This is as true for an elementary-school on the side of a mountain as it is for a group of doctors and surgeons who have not written creatively in a long time. The teacher has to care.

North Carolina Arts Council Fellow

I was named a North Carolina Arts Council Fellow in 2010 in recognition of my Creative Nonfiction essay, “The Quiet.” The essay was the first I had written about my then-recent diagnosis of bi-lateral sensorineural deafness at age 31. The honor has encouraged me to complete a memoir about this vital narrative thread. It is still in process despite my having declared it finished several times.

North Carolina Arts Council Folklife Apprentice

I am currently a 2024-25 North Carolina Arts Council Folklife Apprentice to the mother of the Storytelling Revival, Connie Regan-Blake. Our project is named Bee Bread, for the hunk of honey that honey collectors leave in the hive for the bees to help them survive winter. Legend and treasure of the Storytelling world, Ray Hicks, was Connie’s mentor, and he taught her the term. In our time together, I have explored the history and subject of Irish Fairy Tails in light of Alastair McIntosh’s account of Gaelic culture in Poachers Pilgrimage.

This exploration facilitated my telling my grandmother’s stories of her horrifying experiences of keeping my father and uncle alive during their three-year internment by the Japanese Empire of the Rising Sun in Northeast China at The Courtyard of the Happy Way, as well as my story of the traumatic brain injury I sustained in 2022 which kept me in the dark, literally, for seven months. I have written a book based on what I have learned, entitled Bee Bread: How the Hive of Story Listening and Storytelling (Still) Heals the World. It will be published in the autumn of 2026.