Converse Alumna Becky Gould Gibson to Give Reading at Converse
The Elizabeth Boatwright Coker Visiting Writers Series at Converse College presents a reading by poet and Converse alumna Becky Gould Gibson on Nov. 3 at 8 p.m. in the Bain Room of Wilson Hall. Gibson will read from her work, including her newest award-winning books Need-Fire and Aphrodite’s Daughter. A reception for Gibson will follow the reading. Admission is free and open to the public.
Need Fire, winner of the Bright Hill Press Award, tells the story of the powerful yet silent Hild, a little-known seventh-century abbess who founded a mission along the coastal cliffs in Northern England. Gibson’s bold, visionary poetry and meticulous research weave a partly historical and partly imaginative work focusing on a figure about whom there is little information. “I (found) it extraordinarily freeing to think that, in some ways, we can rewrite history. Or we can take history and extend it through the imagination,” Gibson said.
Aphrodite’s Daughter, which mixes both sassy and serious persona poems of myth with memory of women’s experiences in all their complexity, won the 2006 X.J. Kennedy Prize.
A Converse College graduate and a former professor of English and Women’s Studies at Guilford College, Gibson has also published the collections Off-Road Meditations, Holding Ground and First Life.
Her poems have appeared in many journals, including the Southern Poetry Review, Laurel Review, South Carolina Review, Kalliope and Feminist Studies as well as in several anthologies, including Working the Dirt: An Anthology of Southern Poets (2003) and Don’t Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review (2009). Gibson has won many awards and grants for her poetry, including a North Carolina Arts Council Literary Fellowship in Poetry and the Brockman-Campbell Award. She has recently been named North Carolina’s Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for 2009-2010.
Copies of Gibson’s books will be available for purchase through the Converse bookstore.
For more information, contact Rick Mulkey, director of creative writing at Converse, at rick.mulkey@converse.edu or 864.596.9111.