VALERIE NIEMAN RECEIVES SIR WALTER RALEIGH AWARD

Asked about her recent honor, Valerie Nieman responded, “I am stunned and absolutely delighted that In the Lonely Backwater was selected for the Sir Walter Raleigh Award. A deeply personal work, this novel was many years in the making. I had inspiration from many sources including Sir Walter Raleigh honoree Fred Chappell, friends, fellow writers, and my editors at Regal House wouldn’t let the book – or me – rest until it was ready. I hope it speaks to the complicated, brave, vulnerable, mutable individuals we all are.”

The Sir Walter Raleigh Award is given by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association and the Historical Book Club of North Carolina for the best work of fiction published each year. Nieman’s Raleigh Award novel, published in 2022 by Regal House Publishing in Raleigh, is her fifth novel. She is also the author of three collections of poetry and a collection of short stories. Originally from New York state, Nieman moved to West Virginia and then North Carolina, where she worked as a journalist and professor. In 2000, she became a professor at NC A&T to teach Journalism and work with the newspaper before she began teaching creative writing in the English Department. She has received multiple awards such as the Greg Grummer, Nazim Hikmet, and Byron Herbert Reece poetry prizes. Nieman was also a North Carolina Arts Council poetry fellow (2013–2014) and received an NEA creative writing fellowship. According to Susan O’Dell Underwood, who reviewed Nieman’s novel for NCLR Online Fall 2022, In the Lonely Backwater is “a compelling work of fiction for any reader who loves a good mystery.” n

Raleigh, NC artist TIM LYTVINENKO is a photographer and printmaker. He earned a BS in Computer Science from NCSU and has fifteen years of experience in fine art and documentary photography. His work has been shown at Cameron Art Museum, Anchorlight Gallery, and 21c Museum Hotel in Durham, among others. He was recently commissioned to create work for the 66-foot-tall façade of The Dillion in Raleigh. His work is held in private collections across the East Coast and the South.

2022 James Applewhite Poetry Prize Finalist

BY MAUREEN SHERBONDY

Captain von Trapp in the Surgical Suite

It’s Christopher Plummer in surgical scrubs holding a guitar instead of a scalpel. I tell him his version of “Edelweiss” is a favorite memory from my youth, that every man I later dated was held up to him in that one glowing moment and no one has compared to Captain von Trapp.

My present husband sings karaoke even though he lacks the voice; it takes a certain kind of man to belt out lyrics out of tune and in front of an audience.

Christopher Plummer is about to remove my uterus. I tell him I have terrible doubts about his skill as a surgeon. Just because a person is talented in one arena doesn’t mean that ability spreads to other areas like medicine.

Trust me, he says. The infusion into my veins is a bottle of my favorite gin. Feeling woozy, I shrug, realizing I no longer control either body or life. Before falling under I recall reading that “Edelweiss” was dubbed in by another singer. Is the illusion of talent just as good as the real thing?

Too late to change doctors, I fade in the clean, white room, seeing star-like flowers rising as “Edelweiss” carries across the gurney and my uterus waltzes away from my body.

MAUREEN SHERBONDY is the author of several poetry collections, including, most recently, Lines in Opposition (Unsolicited Press, 2022) and Dancing with Dali (FutureCycle Press, 2020; reviewed in NCLR Online Winter 2022). Her work has appeared in Calyx, Upstreet, European Judaism, Litro, and other journals. She is also a fiction writer, and one of her short stories was a finalist in the Doris Betts Fiction Prize competition and published in NCLR 2007. She lives in Durham, NC.

2022 James Applewhite Poetry Prize Semifinalist

BY JANET FORD

Jubilee

It’s an easy cruise, the ridge we ride. I roll back the throttle and we lean to the turn, your long arm loose across me, the night dividing into clean cool sheets we slide between.

The quarter moon is ahead of us now, a crown on the jaw of dusky hills and we’re heading for it through the crickets and the frogs, our years beneath us purring like a furnace.

In the headlight, grazing ponies look up lazy. There’s the smell of smoke from the fires out west; you’re breathing even at my back, folded close like a pair of wings and we’re somewhere toward an overlook when the darkness thins to the handkerchief a magician lifts, the sun-stunned road now a river of glass closing behind us as though we hadn’t passed.

JANET FORD lives in the foothills of the Brushy Mountains in western North Carolina. A Laureate Finalist in the Pinesongs Awards of 2020 and 2021, she was the recipient of the 2017 Guy Owen Prize from Southern Poetry Review, and her poems have also appeared in Poetry East, Caesura, and NCLR Online. In February 2022, she was featured in Poetry in Plain Sight , and she received the 2022 Susan Laughter Meyers Residency Fellowship Award.

CARRIE TOMBERLIN is an artist and educator based in Asheville, NC. She received her BA in Visual Arts and Creative Writing from Eckerd College and her MFA from Clemson University. Her work is shown regularly in exhibitions throughout the US and abroad. She currently teaches photography and visual culture at UNC Asheville, where she serves as Gallery Director and Lecturer of Art. Prior to her career as an educator, she worked with several non-profit organizations including the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. Her many awards and honors include the 2019 Bronze Award for Environmental Editorial Photography Budapest International Foto Awards and the 2019 Gold Award for Environmental Editorial Photography Tokyo International Foto Awards.