The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest was the debut poetry collection for North Carolina's first woman Poet Laureate (2005-09), Kathryn Stripling Byer, and was published by Texas Tech Press in 1986 as part of the Associated Writing Programs Award Series, selected by John Frederick Nims, who said, "This is one of those rare books of poetry-earthy, sensuous, brave-spirited-that gives us the feeling of a full human life as vividly as a novel aspires to do." Byer is the author of five other volumes of poems, all with Louisiana State University Press, including her latest, Descent, winner of the 2013 SIBA Book Award for Poetry.

Navigating the dangerous currents of family and race, Kathryn Stripling Byer's sixth poetry collection confronts the legacy of southern memory, where too often "it's safer to stay blind."

Beginning with "Morning Train," a response to Georgia blues musician Precious Bryant, Byer sings her way through a search for identity, recalling the hardscrabble lives of her family in the sequence "Drought Days," and facing her inheritance as a white southern woman growing up amid racial division and violence. The poet encounters her own naive complicity in southern racism and challenges the narrative of her homeland, the "Gone with the Wind" mythology that still haunts the region.

Ultimately, Descent creates a fragile reconciliation between past and present, calling over and over again to celebrate being, as in the book's closing manifesto, "Here. Where I am."

The chapbook documents readings and talks from the first annual Nazim Hikmet Poetry Festival, which was held in April, 2009 (Organizers: Buket Aydemir, Pelin Bali, Mehmet C. Ozturk & Birgul Tuzlali). The chapbook is a cooperative publication by scholars, poets, and members of the NC literary community that celebrates the work and influence of Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet. The chapbook includes commentary by NC Poet Laureate Katherine Stripling Byer, and articles on Nazim Hikmet's life and poetry by Greg Dawes (NC State University) and Erdag Goknar, (Duke University). Eight winning poems and two honorable mentions from the poetry competition are also included, representing the work of poets Judy Light Ayyildiz, Katherine Barnes, Jeffery Beam, David Need, Pamela Richardson, Christopher Salerno, Tony Tost, Chris Vitiello, Guney Acipayamli and Mimi Herman. For information on the festival visit: http: //www.nazimhikmetpoetryfestival.org

Kathryn Stripling Byer in these poems engages the contradictions inherent in the act of coming home. She explores the step-by-step leaving and returning- and finding ""home"" transformed because of the journey. Seamless lines of poetry weave together experiences as a daughter and a mother, the challenges of aging, the innate dignity of domestic life, and learning to let go while holding fast to what matters all the while. Byer gathers the trivial things that make up our lives and shows their meaningful connections, our movement toward discovery. In Coming to Rest, she expands upon the great themes of the poetic tradition.

In Catching Light, Kathryn Stripling Byer searches for the language of aging, for a way of confronting every woman's fear of looking in the mirror and seeing an old woman staring back. Inspired by a series of photographs entitled "Evelyn" -- which depicts a former artist's model in her declining years, still full of life and facing death with flair and wit -- Byer finds a voice to contemplate the enigmatic but inevitable process of growing old.

Byer opens her book with a ten-poem sequence, In the Photograph Gallery. "'Who is she?' / a child hanging on to her mother's skirt / asks, as if she is frightened / by what she sees. 'Just a little old lady, ' / her mother soothes / 'That's all she is.'" By placing Evelyn herself in the gallery to respond to the photos, and hear that exchange, Byer opens the door into the inner life of this "little old lady."

Part Two moves into more personal, mythological territory as the images of Evelyn and the poet's own recollections coalesce. The final section draws closer to Evelyn's dark hour, her humor in the face of death, her memories, her acknowledgment of her sexuality, her letting go.

Catching Light is a profound inquiry into aging and how one remarkable woman faces it, sings to it, mocks it, rebels against it, and ultimately embraces it.

Black Shawl emanates from Kathryn Stripling Byer's fascination with female ballad singers in southern Appalachia, whose voices haunt the mountains still, and from the image of a black net or shawl being dragged over the ground, plumbing the depths, collecting bits and fragments of a woman's life. The singers and storytellers of this splendid collection are struggling to answer the query of the book's epigraph: ""What will you make of this?"" The first section, ""Voices,"" offers a variety of female perspectives, those of mothers, daughters, sisters, lovers. These women are singing the old songs and waiting for their lives to change. ""Blood Mountain,"" the second part, experiments with ballad conventions and the mysteries of mythmaking: "" . . . one story's good as another so long as there's blood in it."" Delphia, a quilter and teacher who narrates the third section of Black Shawl, epitomizes these mountain women-the very ones who became the Keepers of the Ballads, the repositories, and who passed down their knowledge. Through the remarkable mountain women of Black Shawl, Byer portrays the singers, once mute, finding their place, weaving a thread in the web of their existence and its endlessly evolving pattern.

In Wildflower Flower, whose title derives from a traditional country song, Byer speaks through the fictional voice of a mountain woman named Alma, who lived in the Blue Ridge wilderness around the turn of the century. In narrative and lyric, Byer's poems sing a journey through solitude, capturing the spirit and the sound of mountain ballads and of the women who sang them, stitching bits and pieces of their hardscrabble lives into lasting patterns. The landscape Byer depicts is haunted by disappointed love and physical hardship, but it is blessed with dogwood and trillium, columbine and hickory, and streams that sing a ballad as strong as any Alma has learned from mother or grandmother. Through these natural details and through Alma's indomitable voice, Kathryn Stripling Byer has brilliantly recreated a lost world.