Welcome to the North Carolina Humanities Council

Nancy Dew Taylor's "Mill Creek Suite" -- a sequence of poems about a young married couple living on a farm near Old Fort, NC, in the early part of the 20th century -- was among more than 130 entries of original poetry, prose, and nonfiction submitted by writers across the country to the Humanities Council's Linda Flowers Literary Award. “Mill Creek Suite” will appear in the winter-spring 2012 issue of North Carolina Conversations, and Taylor will receive support toward a week-long writer’s residency at Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities in Southern Pines. 

Of “Mill Creek Suite,” Taylor says, “The lives depicted in the poems are like those of the people I came to know during the summers my family spent east of Asheville: strong, resilient, self-reliant, loving.”

The North Carolina Humanities Council has named the Gaston County Public Library the 2011 recipient of the Harlan Joel Gradin Award for Excellence in the Public Humanities for “Standing on a Box: Lewis Hine’s National Child Labor Committee Photography in Gaston County, 1908.”

Directed by Gaston County Public Library’s Carol Reinhardt, “Standing on a Box” used photographs taken in 1908 by Lewis Hine – a sociologist, reformer, and National Child Labor Committee journalist – to explore child labor conditions in Greater Gaston’s textile mills at the turn of the nineteenth century.