Revisiting Deliverance

When poet Jocelyn Heath was thirteen years old, her mother taught her to use a sewing machine. Years later, the sewing machine connects Jocelyn to her mother, her grandmother, and a long history of women creators and workers.

James Dickey is perhaps best known for his acclaimed 1970 novel Deliverance, but he was also an accomplished poet. Gordon Van Ness was a personal friend of Dickey’s, and walks us through some of his most underappreciated work.

John Gregory Brown and Carrie Brown, married writers and professors at Sweet Briar, talk about living, writing, and raising children on the college’s campus, and what it was like to win simultaneous recognition at this year’s Library of Virginia Awards

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard, where she confronts the complex racial legacy of her native South.  Tretheway was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, the daughter of a mixed-race marriage, which was illegal in the Mississippi of that era.  Her mother was an African American social worker and her father a white man who hitchhiked to America from Nova Scotia and became a poet and professor. In this interview Tretheway, who in 2012 was named Poet Laureate of Mississippi, reads her poetry from Native Guard and speaks movingly about the black men who served during the Civil War and her own experience of growing up bi-racial in the south.