West Virginia Poet Laureate, Marc Harshman, has won the 2019 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award for his poem, “Poet in the Schools.” The award is presented by the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in New Jersey.
In West Mills by De’Shawn Charles Winslow is one of the most celebrated new debut novels of this season. Those few who are familiar with West Mills, North Carolina, a historically Black community in Mason County, North Carolina, near Franklin, may have wondered if this is the setting. In an interview for the Los Angeles Times, De’Shawn Charles Winslow told Michael Schaub that he based the fictional title town of his novel loosely on South Mills, North Carolina, a historically Black community near Elizabeth City, where he grew up. The setting is in the eastern corner of the state, not the western corner. Similarly Caleb Johnson’s novel, Treeborne, is set in a fictional town of Elberta, Alabama, in the northern part of the state, not the existing town of Elberta near the Gulf Coast.