James Applewhite

James Applewhite is an acclaimed American poet whose poetry has been published in numerous volumes, anthologies, and magazines. He is a 1976 Guggenheim Fellow and was awarded the North Carolina award in Literature in 1995, as well as the Brockman-Campbell Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society and the Jean Stein Award in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2008, he was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. He was born in Stantonsburg, North Carolina, and graduated from Duke University with a Ph.D., where he later headed the Duke Institute for the Arts and is now a professor emeritus. For a period of six years Applewhite ran his family tobacco farm, where V. S. Naipul traveled to interview him for a book about the South. Applewhite now lives in Durham, North Carolina, with his wife Janis.

Ten Things I Can’t Do Without

1. My wife, Jan, lovely still, my intellectual, artistic, romantic partner over the decades.
2. Our house bordered by Seven Mile Creek and the Eno River there beyond the ridge, here in the edge of the Eno River State Park, in Northern Durham County.
3. Summer, fall, winter, spring, near Durham and in our cottage in Banner Elk and the mountains.
4. Our three grown children, Lisa, Jim, and Jeff with their partners respectively, Jim, Martha, and Melody and our four grandchildren Christian (23), Will (18), Cameron (14), and Livia (10).
5. Our many literary and artistic friends especially in Durham, Chapel Hill, Greensboro, Greenville, and Hillsborough.
6. Margaret Bauer, Diane Rodman, Alex Albright, and others at the North Carolina Literary Review.
7. Torrey Stroud and the City Art Gallery in Greenville, North Carolina.
8. The native beauty of North Carolina, from the white-topped cloud now overlooking our Palladian window here in Northern Durham County, to the bronze golden autumn blaze up the flank of Grandfather Mountain in early October near Banner Elk.
9. The exhilaration of an idea, the word-pictures arising, defining feeling—becoming a poem.
10. The privilege of my continuing activity among North Carolina’s many fine poets—the intellectual-artistic interchange that allows my reading-writing psyche to feel itself—if no longer young—still alive and well.