Pamela Duncan

Pamela Duncan was born in Asheville, North Carolina, and reared in Black Mountain and Shelby, North Carolina. She holds a BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MA from North Carolina State University, where she studied with Appalachian author Lee Smith. She teaches creative writing at Western Carolina University....

Lee Smith

Born in Grundy, Virginia, in the coalfields of the southwestern section of the state, Lee Smith depicts an Appalachia steeped in family and community relationships, in supernatural and religious powers, and in musical and cultural traditions through which characters navigate a changing and modernizing world. Smith attended Hollins College, then a women’s college. While there, she studied with Louis Rubin, a leading scholar of southern literature; her classmates included a remarkable number of women who, like Smith, went on to pursue literary careers—for example, author Annie Dillard and literary scholars Lucinda MacKethon and Anne Goodwin Jones....

Long-term youth suicide prevention programs can have sustained effects

The Garrett Lee Smith (GLS) Memorial Suicide Prevention Act was passed in 2004 to address the public health issue of suicide in the USA. Since then, numerous programs have been funded via the GLS program to provide comprehensive, community-based suicide prevention programs to adolescents and emerging adults aged 10-24 years.

The Footprints of Ghosts: Fictional Folklorists in the Work of Gloria Naylor, Lee Smith, Randall Kenan, and Colson Whitehead

This chapter looks at the fictional folklorists who appear in the work of Gloria Naylor, Lee Smith, Randall Kenan, and Colson Whitehead. An interesting pattern emerges when you consider the works of these four writers side-by-side: each of the stories are structured through a metafictive, self-conscious framework, each ask the reader to think critically about notions of authenticity, and each are haunted by ghosts, both figurative and literal. The ghostly is not an arbitrary signifier here. It figures an absence that has something to do with knowledge and text, with literary tourism, and with the inability to ever know, really, the shape of a community’s past, present, or future. This chapter thus argues that the character of the folklorist serves as a metonymic signifier of the absence always present in the representation of cultures.