South Carolina teens share their stories and ideas about how to make their home state better. How can we make South Carolina better? Normally this question is reserved for lawmakers and voters, but Writing South Carolina, volume 3, gives voice to 50 high school juniors and seniors from across the State who have offered suggestions. The University of South Carolina Honors College annual writing contest presents a necessary voice for them as well as a revealing portrait of their lives and desires using their own words and insights. Contest judge Mary Alice Monroe has said of the contributing students, "They are astonishingly talented, further ahead in the game than I was at their age." Through a variety of short, creative genres, students share their own gripping experiences in South Carolina, often about growing up and going to school here. This year's selections range from poems about the cycle of abuse to short stories about minimum wage to essays about problematic sex education in public schools. Writing South Carolina, volume 3, offers a collection steeped in creativity, honesty, and clarity. High school students witness and encounter some of the most subtle and serious problems in South Carolina's school system-and they demand change. Monroe, a New York Times best-selling author of children's books and novels, including A Lowcountry Christmas and The Butterfly's Daughter, provides a foreword.

"All of you who contributed to this book write much better than I did in high school." That remarkable observation was made by Pat Conroy in the foreword to the first collection of student writing generated by the South Carolina High School Writing Contest, and it embodies the contest's goals: to encourage young people to write, to think deeply and creatively, to express themselves and thereby to recognize and cultivate their abilities. This second volume of Writing South Carolina features the insightful and inspiring entries of each of the twenty-nine winners and finalists: high school juniors and seniors who were challenged to share, using any genre, their ideas for making South Carolina a better place to live.

Founded in 2013 by Steven Lynn, dean of the South Carolina Honors College, this annual writing contest was designed to engage the state's future leaders and thinkers. Each year the Honors College invited South Carolina high school juniors and seniors to respond to the question "How can we make South Carolina better?" in 750 words or fewer, in the genre of their choice. The finalists, selected by a panel of preliminary judges, were invited to the University of South Carolina campus for a second round comprising a forty-minute impromptu writing contest. This round was evaluated by two grand judges--South Carolina natives who have achieved national acclaim: short-story writer and novelist Pam Durban and poet Nikky Finney. Each chose a topic for the impromptu contest: write about a meaningful book and complete the statement "I come from...." This volume features the writing of the seventy-one finalists from the 2016-17 South Carolina High School Writing Contest.

A heartfelt collection of personal stories that connect a common past and offer hope for a promising future. For many, South Carolina is a sunny vacation destination. For those who have been lucky enough to call it home, it is a source of rich memories and cultural heritage. In this final volume of State of the Heart, thirtyeight nationally and regionally known writers share their personal stories about places in South Carolina that hold special meaning for them. While this is a book about place, it is ultimately about people's connections to one another, to a complex, common past, and to ongoing efforts to build a future of promise and possibility in the Palmetto State. Editor Aida Rogers groups the essays thematically, with poetry, vintage photographs, and even recipes introducing each section. She unites pieces by New York Times best-selling novelists Patti Callahan Henry, CJ Lyons, and John Jakes; USA Today best-selling mystery writer Susan Boyer; historians Walter Edgar, Orville Vernon Burton, and Bernard Powers; artist and author Mary Whyte; and cookbook authors Sallie Ann Robinson and the Lee Brothers-just to name a few. Nikky Finney, a South Carolina native and winner of the 2011 National Book Award for poetry, provides the foreword. The afterword is written by Cassandra King, author of six novels, including the New York Times best seller The Sunday Wife.

A heartfelt collection of personal stories that connect a common past and offer hope for a promising future. For many, South Carolina is a sunny vacation destination. For those who have been lucky enough to call it home, it is a source of rich memories and cultural heritage. In this final volume of State of the Heart, thirtyeight nationally and regionally known writers share their personal stories about places in South Carolina that hold special meaning for them. While this is a book about place, it is ultimately about people's connections to one another, to a complex, common past, and to ongoing efforts to build a future of promise and possibility in the Palmetto State. Editor Aida Rogers groups the essays thematically, with poetry, vintage photographs, and even recipes introducing each section. She unites pieces by New York Times best-selling novelists Patti Callahan Henry, CJ Lyons, and John Jakes; USA Today best-selling mystery writer Susan Boyer; historians Walter Edgar, Orville Vernon Burton, and Bernard Powers; artist and author Mary Whyte; and cookbook authors Sallie Ann Robinson and the Lee Brothers-just to name a few. Nikky Finney, a South Carolina native and winner of the 2011 National Book Award for poetry, provides the foreword. The afterword is written by Cassandra King, author of six novels, including the New York Times best seller The Sunday Wife.

South Carolina is a state of inspiration as well as recreation. Through its natural beauty, storied heritage, and curious character, the Palmetto State finds its way into the hearts and imaginations of every native, resident, and guest to set foot on its 32,000 square miles of soil. Continuing the format of the popular original, this second volume of State of the Heart: South Carolina Writers on the Places They Love celebrates and commemorates the connections that the accomplished contributors have found in the well-known and far-flung locations most dear to them. With companionable charm and storytellers' spirits, editor Rogers, Aida and the thirty-eight contributors invite you to amble across South Carolina with them for a chance to see the state as they have come to know it. For writers beloved places can captivate, teach, comfort, and occasionally haunt. In this collection contributors reflect on their hometowns, the rivers and roads that marked their lives' journeys, and the maligned neighbourhoods they transformed just by living and working in them. Family beach vacations, churches and churchyards, athletic arenas modest and grand, a mountain vista, a quiet pond, a city park, an old-time produce market, Lake Murray, Brookgreen Gardens these are just a sampling of the nearly three dozen private and public places favoured by this diverse group of writers of fiction, memoir, poetry, history, journalism, and more. Photographs, artwork, verse, and even a few recipes accompany the essays, bringing readers further into sharing the writers' experiences. While State of the Heart is rooted in the landscape of South Carolina, readers from anywhere will relate to its universal themes of growing up and growing old, recognition of past mistakes, returned-to faith, the closeness of family and friends, honouring those who came before, and setting our collective sights on the promise of the future for cherished people and places. Marjory Wentworth, South Carolina's poet laureate, provides the foreword to this collection, which includes her poem ""One River, One Boat.

"How should we improve the state of South Carolina?" That invitingly open-ended question served as the basis for the first annual South Carolina High School Writing Contest as the call went out in fall 2013 to juniors and seniors across the Palmetto State, encouraging them to take a stance through good, thought-provoking writing. The nearly five hundred responses that resulted were as impressive in quality as they were in quantity. Young writers sounded off on issues of race relations, environmental conservation, economic imbalance, opportunities of infrastructure, substance and physical abuse, and the maladies of education. Most wrote on issues of education rooted in their own burgeoning awareness of its gifts and limitations in their lives. From that pool of contestants, twenty-three finalists rose to the top to have their initial entries and subsequent writing on a favorite book or place judged by best-selling author Pat Conroy. The insightful and often revelatory responses from those finalists--including the first, second, and third place winners by grade--are collected here in Writing South Carolina.
In heartfelt essays, poems, short stories, and drama, these diverse writers lay bare their attitudes and impressions of South Carolina as they have experienced it and as they hope to reshape it. The resulting anthology is a compelling portrait of the Palmetto State's potential as advocated by some of its best and brightest young writers. Editor Steven Lynn provides an introduction and contest judge Pat Conroy provides a foreword to the collection.

In State of the Heart, Aida Rogers has crafted an artful love letter to our state, with contributions from a host of nationally and regionally recognized writers who've written short essays on the South Carolina places that they cherish. This anthology provides a multifaceted historical and personal view of the Palmetto State.
Thematically organized, this collection offers a geographic and emotional scope that is as diverse as its contributors. Sportswriters describe beloved arenas; historians reflect on church ruins and forts. A playwright recalls the magic of her first theater experience; a food writer revels in a coastal joint that serves fresh oysters. Backyards, front porches, a small library at a children's home, the drama and camaraderie of building the Savannah River Site, and places that are gone except in the memories of the writers who loved them--these are just a few of the locales covered, all showing how South Carolina has changed and inspired people in a variety of ways.
State of the Heart evokes a sense of history and timelessness by bringing together heartfelt responses to South Carolina locales rooted in memory, drawing on reflection, inspiration, and love. The anthology reveals a state that is more than a playground for tourists; it's a state of human hiding places that echo in the hearts of its literary citizens. Though presented as a book about place, the collection is ultimately about our shared connections to one another, to a complex common past, and to ongoing efforts to frame and build a future of promise and possibility.