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Celebrating our Literary Hall of Famers!

Friday from the Archives: A link roundup of the 2024 Literary Hall of Fame inductees!

We are pausing from our usual Friday from the Archives style this week to celebrate the 2024 inductees to the Literary Hall of Fame, announced at the end of January. They will be feted in October at Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities in Southern Pines, NC.

Our mission here at NCLR is to preserve and promote North Carolina’s rich literary culture. Our Editor, Margaret Bauer, chaired the fifteen person selection committee. She said, “In The Writingest State, narrowing down to five inductees is always a challenge. I appreciate the hard work of the selection committee, membership of which crosses the state and includes at least three generations of readers, publishers, and scholars. We’re looking forward to celebrating the “class of 2024” in October.”

With one notable exception (that needs correcting), we’ve featured the work of four of this cohort over the years.

The Five 2024 Hall of Fame inductees are:

Former North Carolina Poet Laureate Joseph Bathanti

  • Poetry in 1994
  • Wrote ““Spatial and Energetic”: A Conversation with Fielding Dawson” in 1995
  • included in 2017 Online for receiving the 2016 North Carolina Award for Literature

Groundbreaking essayist and educator Anna Julia Cooper

Unfortunately, NCLR has not published anything about this author. Any work about them may be eligible for our John Ehle Prize!


Bestselling novelist Kaye Gibbons

  • subject of “We Were Whole Again”: Kaye Gibbons’s On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon
    by Mary Ann Wilson in 1999


Poet and professor Lenard Moore

  • poetry in 1996, 2004, and 2018
  • Included in 2015 Online for receiving the 2014 North Carolina Award for Literature


Appalachian bard Ron Rash

Not included in these lists are the numerous book reviews for these writers.

Purchase those back issues to get signed at the celebration in October at Weymouth!