Photo by Jan G. Hensley

Shelby Stephenson grew up on a small farm near Benson, in the Coastal Plain of North Carolina. “Most of my poems come out of that background,” he says, “where memory and imagination play on one another. I have written many poems about the mules we worked until I was in the seventh grade and, after that–the tractor. My early teachers were the thirty-five foxhounds my father hunted. The trees and streams, fields, the world of my childhood–all that folklore–those are my subjects.” After leaving the farm for college, he graduated from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (B.A. 1960) where he also studied law, University of Pittsburgh (M.A. 1967), University of Wisconsin-Madison (Ph.D. 1974), and worked as a radio and television announcer, salesman, right-of-way agent, and farmer. He is now professor of English at the University of North Carolina-Pembroke where he has edited Pembroke Magazine since 1979. The state of North Carolina presented him with the 2001 North Carolina Award in Literature. And he has received the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Memorial Award and the Playwright's Fund of North Carolina Chapbook Prize. In addition to a poetic documentary: Plankhouse (with photographs by Roger Manley), he has published Middle Creek Poems, Carolina Shout!, Finch’s Mash, The Persimmon Tree Carol, Poor People, Greatest Hits, and Fiddledeedee. With his wife Linda he has also made the CD and cassette: Hank Williams Tribute. They live on the farm where he was born.

The Family (Now) Back row, l-r: Shelby Stephenson, Kate Whittington (daughter), Michelle Stephenson (daughter-in-law), Jacob Stephenson (son) Front row, l-r: Linda Stephenson (Shelby's wife), John Whittington (son-in-law).

The Family (Then) Shelby is the youngest, with siblings Paul, Marshall, and Rose, and parents Maytle and Paul Stephenson. This family photo from 1942 is featured on the cover of Fiddledeedee, which is a long lyric poem about Shelby's growing up on a farm in rural North Carolina.