North Carolina Poetry Society (NCPS) sponsors this series, which is named after former NC Poet Laureate Fred Chappell and former NCPS president Marie Gilbert. This program is open to poets not currently enrolled in a curriculum. They are mentored by a regional Distinguished Poet who mentors up to four developing poets.

Caitlin Johnson's chapbook Miles won the Alan Bunn Memorial Chapbook Award by St. Andrews College Press. Johnson worked at St. Andrews College Press as managing editor of CAIRN: The St. Andrews Review. She is currently enrolled in a creative writing program at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass., and blogs at “What We Covet,” the shopping weblog she founded in 2010.

Ann Deagon, a 2012 Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet, served as Hege Professor of Humanities and Writer in Residence at Guilford College until her retirement in 1992. She edited The Guilford Review, directed Poetry Center Southeast, and helped establish the North Carolina Writers’ Network. Her poetry collections include Carbon 14, Poetics South, There is No Balm in Birmingham, and The Polo Poems. Her awards include a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

For more information about this program contact Beth Sheffield.