James Applewhite
Appearing as part of the James Hutchins Lecture Series at the UNC-Chapel Hill Center for the Study of the American South, James Applewhite was born in 1935, in Stantonsburg, North Carolina, the great grandson of the Civil War veteran buried on the family farm described by V. S. Naipaul in A Turn in the South. He received his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from Duke University where he taught from 1972 through 2008. His recently finished verse and autobiography Cosmos recalls the influence of Randall Jarrell, whom he met while teaching at UNC Greensboro in the 1960s. Cosmos also records the tension between the Christianity inherited from his family (his mother’s father and brother were Methodist ministers), and the science and philosophy of science central to his academic career. Beginning in 1966, Applewhite has published more than 240 poems in journals and magazines including the Southern Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Sewanee Review, The Atlantic Monthly, New England Review, Antaeus, Harpers, and many other little magazines and anthologies.
Applewhite has published eleven books of poetry, most recently A Diary of Altered Light (LSU Press, 2000) and Selected Poems (Duke Press, 2005). He has also published 19 articles and critical essays on poets and poetry in journals including South Atlantic Quarterly, the Southern Review, the Kenyon Review, the Wallace Stevens Journal, and collections from LSU Press, University of Georgia Press and Oxford University Press. His study of the Romantic influence on modernist poetry, Seas and Inland Journeys, was published by University of Georgia Press in 1985. His awards and honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, the North Carolina Award in Literature, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Jean Stein Award in Poetry and the Associated Writing Programs Contemporary Poetry Prize.
Applewhite and Jan, his wife of over fifty years, live on the edge of the Eno River State Park in northern Durham County. Their three children, Lisa, Jim and Jeff, live in the Triangle region with the four grandchildren Christian, Will, Cam and Livia. Applewhite is currently completing a book re-positioning the Romantic influence on modern poetry, within the post-mythological world view initiated by Newtonian physics and Lockean psychology. In his own new poems, scenes from his early agrarian childhood are set in the light of the expanding cosmos.
