Two More of the Sixteen Writers Featured Under the Jasper Literary Arts Tent at This Year's Rosewood Art & Music Festival - Jo Angela Edwins and Randy Spencer!

We’re excited to invite you to join Jasper and 16 of SC’s finest working writers under the Jasper Literary Arts Tent at this year’s Rosewood Art & Music Festival on Saturday, October 7th from noon - 5 pm. Over the next few weeks we will be spotlighting each of these literary artists here at Jasper Online. Come back to this site often to learn more about these local literary treasures!

Jo Angela Edwins has published poems in over 100 journals and anthologies, recently or forthcoming in The Hollins Critic, Sho Poetry Journal, ONE ART, and Delta Poetry Review. Her collection A Dangerous Heaven was published this year by Gnashing Teeth Publishing, and her chapbook Play was published in 2016 by Finishing Line Press. She has received awards from Winning Writers, Poetry Super Highway, The Jasper Project's Fall Lines, and the South Carolina Academy of Authors. She is a Pushcart Prize, Forward Prize, Best of the Net, and Bettering American Poetry nominee. She teaches at Francis Marion University in Florence, SC, where she serves as the first poet laureate of the Pee Dee region of South Carolina.

Randy Spencer is a retired child psychiatrist living in Chapin. He has a B.A. from William and Mary, his medical degree from Emory University, and an M.F.A. in poetry from South Carolina. He has published two chapbooks of poetry, The Failure of Magic and What the body Knows, and one full-length collection, The Color After Green, a volume of environmentally-inspired poems. His poems have appeared in regional and national journals and anthologies, and in 2022 he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for a poem on the war in Ukraine. His stories and poems have been in Jasper's Fall Lines a literary convergence. His next book, Andersonville, will be out this winter from Muddy Ford Press and is a long sequence of poems telling the story of a prisoner in Andersonville Military Prison in 1864.

Poetry of the People: Jo Angela Edwins

My seventh Poet of the People is Jo Angela Edwins. What impresses me the most about Jo Angela is her humor and ability to find the divine in unexpected places. 

Jo Angela Edwins is the poet laureate of the Pee Dee region of South Carolina and a professor of English at Francis Marion University. Her collection A Dangerous Heaven appears in 2023 from Gnashing Teeth Publishing.

Parts of Speech

Verbs do the heavy lifting:
shoot, explode, weep, scream.

Adverbs tell us, mostly, how:
often, swiftly, wildly.

Adjectives describe:
fearful, mad, thunderous.

Conjunctions link:
armed and dangerous, dead or alive.

Articles define:
an ally, the enemy.

Prepositions direct:
over the wall, through the tunnel, across the killing field.

Interjections exclaim:
Stop! No! Help!

Nouns remind us
that earth is filled with places
where people turn persons
into things.

When Louis Armstrong Landed on the Moon

Quiz question: Who was the first person to set foot on the moon?
Student answer: Louis Armstrong
Picture his space helmet
specially equipped
to accommodate the trumpet.
He must have resembled
a Seussian cartoon:
that polished horn
sticking stiffly through the visor,
the aperture gasketed
tightly with polymers,
a protection against oxygen leaks,
for this man with elastic cheeks
needed all the air he could get
on that airless orb
to shatter silence across
the Sea of Tranquility.
His jaunty rendition
of “When the Saints Go Marching In”
bopped its best that day,
and those saints in their heaven
that hovered like a low ceiling
over his bobbing head
realized slowly
that their feet had gone to tapping
against narrow golden streets.
As he leapt from rock to rock
across that milky desert,
surely his heart skipped beats
in time to music. Back home,
Mission Control heard his gritty vibrato
crooning a capella
through the fuzz of the two-way
as he gazed backwards at the foggy earth:
I think to myself—
what a wonderful world.

(Originally published in Porcupine Literary, issue 2, Summer 2020)

The Lilies You Sent

were lovely for so many days,
and I cannot bring myself to throw them out.
They still offer sheen and a shadow of flair,
but the petals fall in a whoosh. Gravity
is brother to death, and all the green is blackening,
and the water that once held them firm goes brown,
and even a carpel comes tumbling down
here and there. I collect what falls,
dutiful steward to withered angel wings,
and my fingers stain with the glitter of each anther,
the pollen that would propagate what lived
had it not died for the sake of spreading kindness,
a better reason than most, I suppose, to die,
and for this killing that brightened my life, I thank you.

Jasper Presents Fall Lines - a literary convergence Volume IX at Richland Library

Join the Jasper Project on Saturday, March 25 from 2 - 5 pm for the release of Fall Lines - a literary convergence Volume IX at the Main Branch of the Richland Library on Assembly Street.

Poetry and prose accepted for publication in this year’s Fall Lines journal include the following

Fruit – Gil Allen

The turning – Ken Autry

The last battle in Alabama – Ken Autry

Bachman's Warbler – Ken Autry

Bird – Libby Bernardin

with spoiled fruit – Evelyn Berry

Dear Raphael – Al Black

Porcelain doll – Al Black

If I were a man – Cindi Boiter

Prudent – Cindi Boiter

Seamstress – Carolina Bowden

Signs that say what you want them to say (not signs that say what someone else wants you to say) – Lucia Brown

Before we turn on the table saw – Lucia Brown

walking a half-marathon through your hometown – Lucia Brown

Members of the backyard church – Tim Conroy

Nasty Bites – Tim Conroy

How to cut up a chicken – Susan Craig

Touching Wyse's Ferry Bridge – Susan Craig

The Older Poet Yearns to Carpe the Diem – Debra Daniels

Dream Three – Heather Dearmon

Bring Me Something – Heather Dearmon

Across the River - Marlanda DeKine

talking to themselves -  Marlanda DeKine

For my cat, every Sunday afternoon – Graham Duncan

Ghosts in Poems – Jo Angela Edwins

Stricken – Jo Angela Edwins

Nana Lencha – Vera Gomez

You don't know what you don't know – Vera Gomez

Coattails – Kristine Hartvigsen

River – Kristine Hartvigsen

A Quiet Love – Jammie Huynh

A ghazal to my father – Jammie Huynh

Bad Idea Boyfriend, or White Jesus – Shannon Ivey

D. – Suzanne Kamata

Red Bird / Blue Bird – Bentz Kirby

Hunter's Chapel Road – Len Laurin

I love you 3000 – Len Lawson

Crown – Terri McCord

Space – Terri McCord

For a 20% Tip – Rosalie McCracken

"Yes, please" – Melanie McGhee

Cycles – Joseph Mills

Office hours – Joseph Mills

Those of us with bushy white beards – Joseph Mills

So long, Greenie – Eric Morris

Chopin all over her – Eric Morris

Old photos (for Ahmaud Arbery) – Yvette Murray

Thundering shadows – Frances Pearce

Gone to the birds – Glenis Redmond

"Praise how the ordinary turns sacred" – Glenis Redmond

Strangers in a Strange Field – Aida Rogers

Pre-Columbia Intersections – Lawrence Rhu

Meaningless – Michael Rubin

Small things I notice – Randy Spencer

Next Day Now - Randy Spencer

Above the poplars – Arthur Turfa

For the Love of Mz. Joe – Ceille Welch

The Broad River Prize for Prose this year goes to Tim Conroy for his short fiction, Nasty Bites and the Saluda River Prize for Poetry goes to Jo Angela Edwins for her poem, Stricken.

Carla Damron was the adjudicator for the prose prize and Lisa Hammond judged the poetry prize.

Both contributors and the public are invited to attend. Contributors are also invited to read from their included works during the event in the order in which it is published.

Thank you to Carla Damron, Lisa Hammond, Richland Library, the Friends of Richland Library, One Columbia, and Muddy Ford Press for their support of this project.

DR. JO ANGELA EDWINS TALKS EDUCATION, POETRY AND THE NEW NORMAL by Dana Nickel

The Pee Dee’s first poet laureate explains the importance of art in an uncertain era.

“I was always really taken with art, but I was never quite good at it,” Dr. Jo Angela Edwins explains with a laugh. “I tried different instruments, even played the piano for three years. Nothing stuck.”

It wasn’t until a young Edwins saw a poet on the PBS channel giving out writing advice that she considered poetry. The advice was to write one poem a day, everyday in order to develop poetry skill. “For a long time as a kid, I wrote really bad poetry everyday,” she says. “I do think that it  made me really attuned to word the sounds of words and how words fit in a phrase.”

Today, Edwins is a professor of poetry for Francis Marion University’s English department. She usually teaches three to four classes a semester. This spring, she taught two classes on advanced poetry writing and American women authors. Her courses are reading and writing intensive, and COVID-19 really affected how she was able to foster a connection with her students.

“One of the things we do in creative writing is workshopping and feedback.” Edwins continues, “Getting feedback face-to-face is a whole lot different than getting [feedback] through notes on Blackboard.”

To remedy this, she started doing video calls through Zoom with some of her students to go over their work in a more in-depth fashion.

“That was really helpful for the students who [attended] those sessions, I think,” she recalls.

In addition to navigating the pandemic as an educator, Edwins also works on her craft. She explains that one of the main challenges of writing during the pandemic is the reliance on publishers. “I had noticed that it seems like it's taking publishers a lot longer to respond because of the pandemic,” she says.

Edwins also expresses her belief that the arts have gained prominence since the start of the pandemic. As the Pee Dee’s first Poet Laureate, she takes this idea with her when she considers methods to get readers to engage with literature and poetry.

Though this has been a difficult task because of the pandemic, she started a Facebook group, Poetry Across the Pee Dee, to connect readers and writers alike through virtual readings.

“[I’m] having to find alternative methods to let mostly depend on the internet to try to inspire people to consider poetry,” she says.

However, Edwins explains that the pandemic has provided a way for people to discover new interests in art, especially poetry. “If you don't think that the art should be funded ... think about what’s sustaining you right now,” she says. “All of these artists who are writers and directors and actors and singers and songwriters, who wouldn't have an opportunity to create that if their talent hadn't somehow been encouraged and nurtured at some level.”

Throughout our conversation, Edwins repeats the sentiment that art is truly all around us everyday, and art keeps track of our history. “We are living through something that hasn’t happened in anyone’s living memory,” Edwins says, siting that both the pandemic and the current “historical moment” that is bringing Black Lives Matter back into focus. “Both of these events really highlight how much humankind depends on art in general, and particularly poetry, to help us through moments of crisis.”

To help provide a sense of comfort and strength during this uncertain time, Edwins is working with a group of writers to compose Poetry in a time of crisis. “Sometimes with poetry, we can find ways to salve the wounds of the spirit at a time when the physical life feels out of balance,” the poet says.

Her poem, Outbreak, was included in the collection, and it provided an inspiring vision of the pandemic’s conclusion.

“In a world full of fear and profiteering hoarders,

look down at your hands, folded now, skin parched,

and know that they are powerful.”

-By Dana Nickel