Noontime Notions – Poetry and Photography: Common Arts

Photographs present images and words conjure them.  Dr. Ken Chamlee will explore the close connections between these two common arts by sharing a selection of vibrant photographs paired with poems from his new collection If Not These Things.  Chamlee will be joined by his Gilbert-Chappell student Vivian I Bikulege.

Kenneth Chamlee retired in 2018 as Emeritus Professor of English at Brevard College where he taught composition, literature and creative writing for forty years. His poems have appeared in The North Carolina Literary Review, Tar River Poetry, Cold Mountain Review, Pinesong, Kakalak, and in many other places. He has two contest-winning chapbooks, Absolute Faith (ByLine Press) and Logic of the Lost (Longleaf Press), and is a 2022 Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for the North Carolina Poetry Society.  A book of poems, If Not These Things, was released by Kelsay Books in 2022 and his poetic biography of 19^th century American landscape painter Albert Bierstadt, The Best Material for the Artist in the World, is forthcoming from Stephen F. Austin University Press in 2023.  Learn more at www.kennethchamlee.com.

Vivian Bikulege  is a mentee in the 2022 Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet program of the North Carolina Poetry Society. A Pushcart nominee, Vivian is published in the Broad River Review, Witness: Appalachia to Hatteras, Pinesong, Flying South, among other places. She is the winner of the 2018 Carrie McCray Memorial Literary Award for her essay “Cuttings,” published by Bloomsbury Academic’s Reading as a Writer. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Queens University of Charlotte, and lives in Brevard.

Noontime Notions programs are held one Tuesday each month at noon and will feature authors, performers, and presenters providing engaging notions for consideration, enjoyment, and discovery.  The program begins at 12 noon in the Rogow Room at the Transylvania County Library and is made possible by the Friends of the Library. Won’t You Be A Friend?