Shelby Stephenson

Shelby Stephenson grew up on a small farm near Benson, in the Coastal Plain of North Carolina. "Most of my poems come out of that background," he says, "where memory and imagination play on one another. My early teachers were the thirty-five foxhounds my father hunted. The trees and streams, fields - childhood - those are my subjects." After leaving the farm for college, he was graduated from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Wisconsin...See more

Shelby Stephenson grew up on a small farm near Benson, in the Coastal Plain of North Carolina. "Most of my poems come out of that background," he says, "where memory and imagination play on one another. My early teachers were the thirty-five foxhounds my father hunted. The trees and streams, fields - childhood - those are my subjects." After leaving the farm for college, he was graduated from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has worked as a radio and television announcer, salesman, right-of-way agent, and farmer. He retired as professor emeritus from the University of North Carolina-Pembroke, where he edited Pembroke Magazine from 1979 to 2010. The state of North Carolina presented him with the 2001 North Carolina Award in Literature. In 2014 he was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. He has received the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Memorial Award, the Oscar Arnold Young Poetry Prize, Playwright's Fund of North Carolina Chapbook Prize, Bright Hill Press Chapbook Award, and the Brockman-Campbell Poetry Prize. See less