Cathy Smith Bowers named state poet laureate of North Carolina

Cathy Smith Bowers, whose poems have been appearing in The Georgia Review since 1984, has been named state poet laureate of North Carolina by Gov. Bev Perdue. Bowers, born and reared in Lancaster, South Carolina, but a longtime resident of NC, succeeds Kathryn Stripling Byer and will serve in the post for two years.
      In 1990, Bowers won a $5,000 General Electric Younger Writers Award for poems published in The Georgia Review in 1988 and 1989. She and then-Review editor Stanley W. Lindberg received the award during a ceremony and reading held at the Grolier Club in New York and hosted by George Plimpton. Under a five-year grant from GE, a total of some twenty-five under-forty authors were supported—among them another Georgia Review contributor, fiction writer Erin McGraw, and the novelist/environmentalist Rick Bass.
      Bowers’ first book, The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas (1992), was the inaugural winner in an award series established by Texas Tech University Press. This competition honored poet and longtime TTU faculty member Walter McDonald, who read literary magazines in search of new talent and then invited a handful of poets to submit book manuscripts for consideration. McDonald discovered Bowers through The Georgia Review, and when her book was published it featured an extended preface by the Review’s then-associate editor and now-editor Stephen Corey.
      The Love has been followed by Traveling in Time of Danger (1999) and A Book of Minutes (2004), both published by Iris Press—which also reissued Bowers’ first collection in 1997. Cathy Smith Bowers taught for many years on the regular faculty of Queens College in Charlotte and for that school’s low-residency MFA program in creative writing. Now semi-retired, she continues to work with the MFA students and also teaches part time at the University of North Carolina–Asheville, which is near her current home in the town of Tryon.