Columbus State University’s Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians is dedicated to preserving the legacy of Carson McCullers; to nurturing writers and musicians and educating young people; and to fostering literary, musical, artistic, and intellectual culture in the United States and abroad.

Monica Macansantos

The Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians is proud to announce that Monica Macansantos is the winner of the 20th annual Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellowship for Writers. As the fellowship recipient, Monica will live and work in Carson McCullers’s childhood home, the Smith-McCullers House, in Columbus, Georgia, for three months. 

Monica Macansantos is the author of Returning to My Father's Kitchen: Essays (Curbstone/Northwestern University Press, 2025), and Love and Other Rituals: Stories (2022). Her honors include a 2024-25 Shearing Fellowship with the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas, and residencies at Hedgebrook, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the I-Park Foundation, Storyknife Writers Retreat, and Monson Arts.

She holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, Michener Center for Writers, and a PhD from the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. Her work has appeared in Colorado Review, River Styx, Bennington Review, The Hopkins Review, Electric Lit, and Lit Hub, among others, and has been named Notable in the Best American Essays 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2016.   

Named in honor of Carson's parents, The Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellowship for Writers was inspired by McCullers's experience at the Breadloaf Writer's Conference in Vermont and, especially, the Yaddo Arts Colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. To honor the contribution of these residency fellowships to McCullers's work, the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians awards fellowships for writers to spend time in McCullers's childhood home in Columbus, Georgia. The fellowships are intended to afford the writers in residence uninterrupted time to dedicate to their work, free from the distractions of daily life and other professional responsibilities.  

Phase Two of the complete renovation of the Carson McCullers House in Nyack is almost complete. The phase comprises rebuilding the north (kitchen) porch and has required a great deal of foundation work. In addition to suffering from wood rot and deterioration, the previous stairs to the porch were too steep and thus not up to code. To alleviate that problem, Aurell Garcia Architects redesigned the stairs and added a landing that, along with the new foundation, makes for a much safer, more attractive, and code-compliant structure. 

Additional work at the house has included installation of landscaping plants in front. The plan, designed by landscape architect Maryellen Lewarn, features plants native to the region and in varieties that will bloom or otherwise provide color at different times throughout the year. The plan also includes a drip irrigation system offering the most economical and sustainable source of moisture. 

The next phase of renovation will be a major one: bumping out the back (east) wall to accommodate an ADA-compliant elevator, rebuilding the screened porch on back—most visitors’ favorite feature because of its spectacular view of the Hudson River—rebuilding the foundation under the porch and garden apartment, and installation of the elevator. 

Dr. Carlos Dews—founding director of the Carson McCullers Center and editor of both volumes of the Library of America’s Complete Works of Carson McCullers as well as McCullers’s unfinished autobiography Illumination and Night Glare—has been at work these past several years editing the Collected Letters of Carson McCullers. The manuscript is finished and is in the hands of HarperCollins Publishers, who intend to bring out the volume in September of next year. In addition to letters McCullers wrote to a wide range of correspondents throughout her life, the volume will also include a number of photographs.  

An event to showcase the new volume is tentatively planned at the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center in Manhattan. Stay tuned for more details! 

Carlos Dews

The first-ever documentary film about Carson McCullers, Claudia Müller’s Wunderkind Carson McCullers, which was co-produced by the Carson McCullers Center and premiered in New York last October, received its first Columbus screening on Sunday, February 2, at the Columbus Museum. An audience of approximately 100 viewers watched the film in the Museum auditorium after a brief introduction from McCullers Center director Nick Norwood. The film is currently available on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/wunderkind

Tayari Jones

The McCullers Center, in collaboration with Muscogee County Libraries, hosted the Carson McCullers Literary Festival 2025 February 21-22, on the Main Stage of the Riverside Theatre Complex on Columbus State University’s River Park Campus. Featured speaker, novelist Tayari Jones, drew the biennial festival’s largest crowd to date—an audience of around 200—for her Friday night reading. Other events included a celebration of writing by high school students from around the states of Georgia and Alabama and college students from Columbus State University in the form of an awards ceremony honoring the winners of the Carson McCullers Literary Awards, readings on the Main Stage by former writers in residence at the Carson McCullers Center whose work has recently been published—novelists Samuel Kọ́láwọlé, Lauren Green, Melissa Pritchard, and Snowden Wright—and a solo concert in the Bo Bartlett Center by singer/songwriter Aimee Bobruk—also a former writer in residence at the McCullers Center. 

From left to right: Nick Norwood, Samuel Kọ́láwọlé, Aimee Bobruk, Melissa Pritchard, Tayari Jones, Lauren Green, and Snowden Wright

Writer Howard Fishman, the 19th annual Marguerite and Lamar Smith Writer in Residence at the Carson McCullers Center, gave his end-of-residency performance at the Columbus Library Auditorium on Wednesday, March 12. The titular subject of Fishman’s book To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse, was a relative of CSU’s own Tom Converse, an archivist who has worked extensively with the Carson McCullers Suite of materials in the CSU Archives. The performance featured a staged conversation with Fishman and Converse moderated by McCullers Center director Nick Norwood, and concluding with a Q&A with the audience. Ranging from subjects related to Connie Converse’s life and work to those related to her extended family, of which Tom Converse is a part, the conversation dwelled a good deal on the “mystery” of Connie’s disappearance in the 1970s, which has never been solved, her whereabouts and likely end still unknown.  

Howard Fishman

Fishman, an acclaimed author, culture writer, playwright, and musician, spent the months of December 2024 and January and March 2025 at the Smith-McCullers House in Columbus. Fishman has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Washington Post Magazine, The Boston Globe, Artforum, Vanity Fair, and other publications. His book on Connie Converse was published by Dutton/Penguin Random House in 2023. 

From left to right: Tom Converse, Nick Norwood, and Howard Fishman

Shane McCrae

Poet Shane McCrae read from his work in Arnold Hall Auditorium at Columbus State University on Monday, February 3, as part of the Georgia Poetry Circuit. McCrae’s recent books of poems include Cain Named the Animal, a finalist for the Forward Prize and longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award, and The Many Hundreds of the Scent. New and Collected Hell, his newest book of poems, was published in February, 2025, and has already garnered high acclaim. His memoir, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun, was published in 2023. Also in 2023, McCrae was awarded the Arthur Rense Poetry Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His other awards include a Lannan Literary Award and a Whiting Writer's Award. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University. 

Founded at Mercer University in 1985, the Georgia Poetry Circuit is a consortium of ten Georgia colleges and universities working together to bring three poets of national and international reputation annually to all members’ campuses, providing an important access to the literary arts for Georgia residents across the state. At each school, each Circuit poet gives a free and open reading of his/her work. Visiting poets also meet with creative writing students at each campus for workshops, talks, or extended question and answer sessions. In addition to the opportunity to hear work from diverse writers of national and international reputation, the Circuit events provide Georgia students with an immensely valuable educational opportunity for interaction with many of the best contemporary poets in the United States. Recent GPC poets include Adrian Matejka, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Sholeh Wolpe, Kevin Prufer, and Kim Addonizio. 

The Carson McCullers Center has sponsored CSU’s participation in the GPC for the past 20 years. 

The results, so far, are spectacular, as all observers agree, and I should not fail to acknowledge the excellent work of Margaret Garcia and Walter Aurell of Aurell Garcia Architects, and the work of David Sirois Construction. I would also like to congratulate Maryellen Lewarn, the landscape architect who has done such an excellent job with the design and planting of landscaping in front. The improvement in the appearance of the house is not just unmistakable, it’s absolutely stunning. 

Our dedication to supporting literature and the arts also extends to our hosting of writers like Padraig Rooney, esteemed Irish poet and biographer of the newly published Rebel Angel: The Life and Times of Annemarie Schwarzenbach. The subject of Rooney’s book was perhaps the greatest love of Carson McCullers’s life and the dedicatee of McCullers’s second novel Reflections in a Golden Eye. Schwarzenbach was also a noted photographer, journalist, and writer in her own right, so we are thrilled to be collaborating with the Columbus Public Library in hosting a talk and book-signing by Padraig Rooney on Tuesday, October 21, at 6:00 pm. Mark your calendars! 

Meanwhile, keep the faith, ye lovers of art and culture, and, as always, thank you for your support of the Carson McCullers Center. 

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For information on making gifts, contact the Carson McCullers Center at:

phone: 706-565-1200

email: mccullerscenter@columbusstate.edu

Or mail contributions to:

The Carson McCullers Center

English Department

Columbus State University

4225 University Avenue

Columbus, GA 31907

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