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Cullowhee’s Byer is state’s poet laureate
By Lynn Hotaling
 Gov. Mike Easley last week appointed Cullowhee’s Kay Byer as Poet Laureate of North Carolina. As poet laureate, Byer will serve as an ambassador of the state’s literature, Easley said.
“Byer’s talents have earned her many honors and awards, and I know she will be an outstanding representative of North Carolina’s rich literary arts,” he said. “She will be an important connection between our writing community and the public.”
Byer will participate in public events and design a long-term program or project of special interest using resources from the Arts Council and other partners. She will also write poems commemorating occasions of historic or cultural importance.
The poet laureate serves a two-year term, renewable at the governor’s discretion.
Selection criteria for the job stipulate that the appointee must be a North Carolinian “with deep connections to the cultural life” of the state whose work reflects literary excellence. The poet laureate must also be someone with “influence on other writers and an appreciation of literature in its diversity throughout the state” who has a statewide, national or international reputation.
“I’m overwhelmed and honored,” Byer said Monday. “And a bit daunted. (Previous Poet Laureate) Fred (Chappell) set the bar very high for this post, and it’s going to be a challenge to live up to his example.”
Byer’s selection as poet laureate is not the first time she’s been honored by Gov. Easley. She received the North Carolina Award in literature in 2001, and her citation from Easley indicated she was chosen because of her “celebration of this state’s human spirit through her poetry.”
A lifelong resident of the rural South, Byer writes “poems that are stirring and haunting, particularly when she gives voice to the women of Appalachia,” according to the 2001 citation.
Though born and raised in south Georgia, Byer has lived most of her adult life in Cullowhee. A graduate of Wesleyan College in Macon, Ga., she earned a master of fine arts degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Byer is the author of four collections of poems, “Catching Light” (2002), “Black Shawl” (1998), “Wildwood Flower” (1992) and “The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest” (1986).
“Wildwood Flower received the Lamont Poetry Prize and “Black Shawl” received the Roanoke-Chowan Award and Brockman-Campbell Award. “Catching Light” was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry and received the Southeast Booksellers Association Best Book of the Year in Poetry Award in 2003.
Byer is also the author of several chapbooks including “The Evelyn Poems” and “Wake,” a collection of poems written in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Louisiana State University Press will publish her next book in 2006, and The Atlantic has accepted a poem for publication, Byer said.
A cantata, “Alma,” composed by Harold Schiffman and based on Byer’s “Wildwood Flower,” will premier in April at Florida State University.
Byer has served as poet-in-residence at both Western Carolina University and Lenoir-Rhyne College. She is also a former poetry instructor in the Master’s of Fine Arts Program at UNC-G and has served on the boards for the N.C. Writer’s Network, Writer’s Workshop and The Arts Journal.
Byer lives in Cullowhee with her husband, Jim, an English professor at WCU. They have one daughter, Cory, also a published poet and writer.
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