Chapel Hill and Carrboro

Writer and musician Bland Simpson offers a special excursion through the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery, where dozens of esteemed writers from North Carolina’s past are at rest, though their works live on. More recent generations of dedicated wordsmiths have also launched their careers in these two towns that surround the first state-supported university in the United States.

Writers with a connection to this area: Milton Abernathy, Alice Adams, Daphne Athas, Ellyn Bache, Doris Betts, Will Blythe, Anthony Buttitta, Michael Chitwood, Jane Toy Coolidge, Libba Cotten, Pam Durban, Charles Edward Eaton, John Ehle, William Faulkner, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Candace Flynt, Shelby Foote, Roland Giduz, Marianne Gingher, Edward Kidder Graham, Frank Porter Graham, Elizabeth Lay Green, Paul Green, Edwin Greenlaw, Caroline Lee Hentz, Fred Hobson, Linda Whitney Hobson, George Moses Horton, Robert B. House, Noel Houston, Langston Hughes, Wallace Kaufman, Randall Kenan, Robert Kirkpatrick, Frederick Koch, Charles Kuralt, Phillip Manning, Michael McFee, Ruth Moose, Josefina Niggli, Frances Gray Patton, Peggy Payne, Walker Percy, Reynolds Price, Lillian Hughes Prince, William Meade Prince, Jessie Rehder, Louis D. Rubin Jr., John Russell, Phillips Russell, David Sedaris, Phillip Shabazz, Alan Shapiro, Bland Simpson, Betty Smith, Cornelia Phillips Spencer, Elizabeth Spencer, Max Steele, Gertrude Stein, James Street, James Taylor, Daniel Wallace, Thomas Wolfe, Richard Wright, Jonathan Yardley and Valerie Raleigh Yow

North Carolina Arts Council Literary Fellows: Michael Chitwood, Chapel Hill (poet, 1990); Marianne Gingher, Greensboro (fiction writer, 1985, 1986 and 1991); Michael McFee, Durham (poet, 1986); Ruth Moose, Pittsboro (fiction writer and poet, 1988); Peggy Payne, Apex (fiction writer 2002); and Daniel Wallace, Chapel Hill (fiction writer, 1991).

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