Shelby Stephenson’s Possum

Location: R.A. Fountain

We joined the Order of the Possum before hosing our first literary event, a Possum Day celebration with East Carolina legend and North Carolina Poet Laureate Shelby Stephenson, who read from his first book about possums called, well, Possum.  Several area residents came by to tell their own possum stories.

Shelby and his wife, Linda, live on the Stephenson family farm where Shelby was raised in rural Johnston County.

“We were so poor,” Stephenson said, “that we had possums for yard dogs, and most of my poems come out of that background, where memory and imagination play on one another.”

Possum was published in 2004 by Bright Hill Press in Treadwell, NY.  You can get it from RAF’s e.store for $6 plus tax & s/h.

More possums from Shelby: Elegies for Small Game and The Persimmon Tree Carol.

Tags: literary, poetry reading