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.

Mallarmé Music, a chamber music ensemble based in Durham, NC, working with Paradox Opera of Morrisville, NC, presented the newly composed opera The Heart is a Lonely Hunter on Saturday, August 3, in a performance dedicated to the opera’s librettist, Carey Scott Wilkerson, who passed away suddenly in July. The opera score is by composer Robert Chumbley.

Several years ago, the McCullers Center and the McCullers Estate awarded composer Chumbley the operatic rights to The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The composer said he was particularly attracted to the work because it would require two main characters to be mute amid the setting of the most sonically large art form, opera. Chumbley also recognized that because the themes of the novel are still so relevant, if not more so, some 65 years after its initial publication, it made perfect material for such an adaptation. The McCullers Center then connected Chumbley with the gifted librettist Carey Scott Wilkerson, creative writing professor at Columbus State University and a renowned poet and nationally known McCullers scholar.

With the assistance of Alissa Roca, director of Paradox Opera, Mallarmé hired eight diverse young vocalists and a collaborative pianist to gather in Chapel Hill to record the opera, August 1-2, 2024. Composer Robert Chumbley conducted the ensemble and audio engineer and UNC-CH assistant professor Pablo Vega recorded the project. Mallarmé Music then gave a concert performance of the 90-minute opera at the Durham Arts Council’s PSI Theatre on August 3, in a performance open to the public.

Dr. Carey Scott Wilkerson, Associate Professor of English, suffered a stroke and passed away on Sunday, July 7, 2024.

Scott was a beloved member of the English Department, where he taught composition, literature, and creative writing. A highly accomplished writer, Dr. Wilkerson published books of poetry, fiction, and drama and wrote the libretti for several successful operas, including Eddie’s Stone Song, Odyssey of the First Pasaquoyan: An Opera in One Act about Eddie Owens Martin, the creator of Pasaquan; and for an operatic adaptation of Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, which was performed by Mallarmé Music in Durham, NC, on August 3. His plays were performed in Georgia, California, New York, Oregon, and at a number of venues in Germany. He received Columbus State’s Creative Endeavors Award in 2018 and an Outstanding Teacher of Writing Award in 2017. He was nominated for the Pushcart Prize on two occasions and for the Georgia Author of the Year Award in 2022.

Dr. Wilkerson held a BA in English from Auburn University, an MA in English from Auburn University at Montgomery, an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte, and a PhD in Creative Writing from Georgia State University. He began teaching at CSU in 2007 as an adjunct faculty member, later became a fulltime lecturer, and eventually a tenured associate professor.

Scott will be remembered by his students and colleagues as one of the kindest and most supportive and collegial members of the Columbus State community.

Wunderkind, Carson McCullers – A Film by Claudia Müller, which was co-produced by the Carson McCullers Center, is in the can and will be premiered in New York in late October. This first-ever documentary film about Carson McCullers features interviews of McCullers scholar Dr. Carlos Dews and biographer Mary Dearborn, writer and gay-rights activist Sarah Schulman, writer and Columbus native Natalia Temesgen, film and culture critic Rex Reed, singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega, and others. With extensive film footage shot in Nyack, Brooklyn, and Columbus, still images of Carson, her family, friends, fellow writers and associates, and rare film clips of Carson from the BBC and from a home movie shot on her wedding day by her friend Helen Harvey, and voice-over readings from some of her most famous works, the film presents a complete picture of McCullers as the great American author she became. The film will be screened in both Nyack and New York City in the fall, and in Columbus early in the new year.

After its two-year restoration, the Smith-McCullers House in Columbus has reopened for events and house tours. On April 23, a reception was held for Mary Dearborn, author of the new biography of Carson McCullers, before her appearance at the Columbus Public Library, where she was interviewed on stage by McCullers Center Director Nick Norwood, an event co-hosted by The Georgia Center for the Book, the Chattahoochee Valley Libraries, and the McCullers Center. In May, the Center hosted the CSU Faculty Senate’s last monthly faculty gathering of the 2023-2024 academic year at the house, an event held primarily in the back garden but for which the house was open for visitors to wander through and enjoy the exhibits. Some 50-60 CSU faculty members and their families attended, as did President Stuart Rayfield, Interim Provost Pat McHenry, Associate Provost Alicia Bryan, and others.

Since reopening, the McCullers Center was welcomed house tour visitors from a number of U.S. states, including California, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, North Carolina, New Jersey, and Ohio, as well as visitors from Canada and France.

Nick Norwood (left), Mary Dearborn (right)

The Georgia Center for the Book, the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, and the Chattahoochee Valley Libraries hosted a special event with biographer Mary V. Dearborn, whose new book Carson McCullers: A Life was recently published by Knopf. Dearborn’s previous seven books include Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim and Ernest Hemingway, among others. McCullers Center Director Nick Norwood interviewed Dearborn on stage in a conversation covering aspects of Carson McCullers’s extraordinary body of work, her life growing up in Columbus, and Dearborn’s own process in writing a literary biography. While working on the book, Dearborn visited Columbus on three separate occasions, staying at the Smith-McCullers House—Carson McCullers’s childhood home—while researching the writer’s life in the CSU Archives. Her book has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, and many other venues.

In early May, artist Tim Youd completed a two-week residency at the Smith-McCullers House in Columbus, during which time he retyped Carson McCullers’s first novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter on a period-correct manual typewriter. Youd completed much of the retyping on the Stark Avenue home’s front porch. The rest he retyped in the foyer of the Corn Center for the Visual Arts on Columbus State University’s Riverpark Campus. This is the second McCullers novel Youd has retyped. Pre-pandemic he retyped The Member of the Wedding at the Carson McCullers House in Nyack, completing that entire project on the historic home’s front porch.

Tim Youd is a performance and visual artist working in painting, sculpture, and video. To date, he has retyped 76 novels at various locations in the United States and Europe. Residencies at historic writers' homes have included William Faulkner's Rowan Oak with the University of Mississippi Art Museum (Oxford, MS), Flannery O'Connor's Andalusia with SCAD (Milledgeville and Savannah, GA), and Virginia Woolf's Monk's House (Rodmell, Sussex). His work has been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions, including CAMSTL, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, Hanes Art Gallery at Wake Forest University, The New Orleans Museum of Art, Monterey Museum of Art, Hemingway-Pfeffer Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, University of Mississippi Art Museum at Rowan Oak, and the Lancaster Museum of Art and History. He has presented and performed his 100 Novels project at the Ackland Art Museum, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Art Omi, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), and LAXART, and retyped Joe Orton's Collected Plays at The Queen's Theatre with MOCA London. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

The Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians is proud to announce that Howard Fishman is the winner of the 19th annual Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellowship for Writers. As the fellowship recipient, Howard will live and work in Carson McCullers’s childhood home, the Smith-McCullers House, in Columbus, Georgia, for three months.
 
Howard Fishman is the author of To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse (Dutton). He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, which has published his essays on music, film, theater, literature, travel, and culture, and his work has also appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Telegraph, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, Artforum, San Francisco Chronicle, Mojo, and The Boston Globe. His play, A Star Has Burnt My Eye, was a New York Times “Critics Pick.” As a performing songwriter and bandleader, Fishman has toured internationally as a headlining artist for over two decades. He has released eleven albums to date, and is the producer of the album Connie’s Piano Songs: The Art Songs of Elizabeth “Connie” Converse. He is based in Brooklyn, NY.

The Carson McCullers Literary Festival 2025 will be a gathering of readers, writers, CSU students and faculty, and high school students from around the region, highlighted by our featured speaker, novelist and NEA Big Read author Tayari Jones. This Literary Festival will represent the culmination of a month-long series of events in collaboration with Chattahoochee Valley Libraries as Tayari Jones’s Silver Sparrow will be the area’s community read for the coming year and the Libraries have received a Big Read grant to support Jones’s appearance at the McCullers Literary Festival and to put on other events as part of the community read. Another highlight of the festival will be a celebration of writing in the form of an awards ceremony honoring the winners of the Carson McCullers Literary Awards. The Festival will also constitute the culminating event for a series of readings and public appearances by former writers in residence at the Carson McCullers Center whose work has recently been published. Those writers include novelists Samuel Kọ́láwọlé, Lauren Green, Melissa Pritchard, and Snowden Wright, and singer/songwriter Aimee Bobruk. And last but not least, the Festival will feature the Columbus premiere of the first-ever documentary film about Carson McCullers—Wunderkind Carson McCullers, a film by Claudia Müller, which was co-produced by the McCullers Center.

Leslie Sainz

Shane McCrae

Camonghne Felix

During the coming academic year, the Carson McCullers Center will host three poets in the Georgia Poetry Circuit:

Friday, November 8: Leslie Sainz

Monday, February 3: Shane McCrae

Wednesday, April 9: Camonghne Felix

Stay tuned for more details!

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