Joseph Bathanti

Poet Laureate of North Carolina, 2012-2014

Joseph Bathanti is former Poet Laureate of North Carolina (2012-14) and recipient of the 2016 North Carolina Award for Literature. He is the author of ten books of poetry, including Communion Partners; Anson County; The Feast of All Saints; This Metal, nominated for the National Book Award, and winner of the Oscar Arnold Young Award; Land of Amnesia; Restoring Sacred Art, winner of the 2010 Roanoke-Chowan Award, given annually by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association for best book of poetry in a given year; Sonnets of the Cross; Concertina, winner of the 2014 Roanoke-Chowan Award; and The 13th Sunday after Pentecost, released by LSU Press in 2016. His novel, East Liberty, won the 2001 Carolina Novel Award. His novel, Coventry, won the 2006 Novello Literary Award. His book of stories, The High Heart, won the 2006 Spokane Prize. They Changed the State: The Legacy of North Carolina’s Visiting Artists, 1971-1995, his book of nonfiction, was published in early 2007. His recent book of personal essays, Half of What I Say Is Meaningless, winner of the Will D. Campbell Award for Creative Nonfiction, is from Mercer University Press. A new novel, The Life of the World to Come, was released from University of South Carolina Press in late 2014. Bathanti is Professor of Creative Writing at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolna, and the University’s Watauga Residential College Writer-in-Residence. He served as the 2016 Charles George VA Medical Center Writer-in-Residence in Asheville, North Carolina.

Crossing the Rift: North Carolina Poets on 9/11 and Its Aftermath
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Edited by Joseph Bathanti and David Potorti

ISBN 978-1-950413-37-9 (softcover)
ISBN 978-1-950413-38-6 (hardcover)

9 x 6 inches, 218 pages

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These poems tore me apart again with loss, shock, and rage; then put me back together with empathy, truth, and hope. While they speak to a specific historical event, they are timeless, offering us a lens through which to examine and better understand our current, tumultuous times. —Richard Blanco, 2013 Presidential Inaugural Poet

Anson County by Joseph Bathanti
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Carolina Classics Editions

ISBN 978-1-935708-81-0

8.5 x 5.5 softcover, 72 pages

Originally published 1989 by William & Simpson

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“In Anson County, Joseph Bathanti's generous heart turns the local into universal praises. Radiant as a welcome sun after rain, his reverence for people, places, and things fashions rare and extraordinary truths. Anson County is a substantive union of hymn and prayer.” —Shelby Stephenson, Poet Laureate of North Carolina, 2014-2016

This Metal by Joseph Bathanti
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Carolina Classics Editions

ISBN 978-1-935708-28-5

8.5 x 5.5 softcover, 144 pages

Originally published 1996 by St. Andrews College Press, Laurinburg, NC

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In Joseph Bathanti’s book, This Metal, the poems coming out of the furnace of family history and memory strike me as being like a metamorphic rock, their structure rendered solid, yet all the while containing the pressures, the heat and kindling, of the context from which they came. —Kathryn Stripling Byer, Poet Laureate of North Carolina, 2005-2009

Land of Amnesia by Joseph Bathanti
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ISBN 978-0-9816280-7-3

8 x 5 softcover, 84 pages

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In this focused gathering of wildly wayward poems, Joseph Bathanti evokes so many invisible realities—some sensual, some subtle—that characterize the heart that beats in the bosom of a Southern countryside he partly describes from loving gut-contact, and another that he painstakingly imagines. —Al Young, Poet Laureate of California, 2005-2008