NORTH CAROLINA POETRY SOCIETY
Board Members for 2021-23
President: Alana Dagenhart is a poet, teacher, and artist who thinks North Carolina is a fine place for writing poetry. Her recent work explores connections between her Appalachian roots and the cultural environment and experience of the sojourner in Central America. She is professor of English at Johnson & Wales University, Charlotte, where she teaches creative writing, composition, and literature. Her other interests include ecopoetics, painting, learning Spanish, and skiing. She lives in Statesville and is the author of Blood (Finishing Line, 2016) and Yellow Leaves (Redhawk, 2022).
Vice President of Programming: Melinda Thomsen is the author of three poetry collections. Armature (Hermit Feathers, 2021) was a finalist for the 2022 Eric Hoffer da Vinci Eye award and an honorable mention in the 2019 Lena Shull Poetry Contest from NC Poetry Society. Her chapbooks Field Rations (2011) and Naming Rights (2007) are from Finishing Line Press. Her fourth book, Dropping Sunrises in a Jar, also from Finishing Line Press, arrives in June 2024. Find her latest poems in Salamander Magazine, Artemis Journal, THEMA, The Ekphrastic Review, Poetry Miscellany, The New York Quarterly, and Poetry Quarterly. A 2019 Pushcart Nominee from The Comstock Review, she’s an advisory editor for Tar River Poetry and lives in North Carolina with her husband Hunt McKinnon, two cats, and one chicken.
Senior Vice President of Membership: Joan Barasovska lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She hosts a monthly poetry series at McIntyre’s Books in Pittsboro. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Kakalak, San Pedro River Review, Flying South, Crossing the Rift, Red Fez, Speckled Trout Review, Main Street Rag, Redheaded Stepchild Magazine, and other journals and anthologies. Joan has been nominated for Best of the Net and twice for the Pushcart Prize. She is the author of Birthing Age (Finishing Line, 2018), Carrying Clare (Main Street Rag, 2022), and Orange Tulips (Redhawk, 2022). Joan joined NCPS in 2012 and has served as Sr. VP of Membership since 2017.
Vice President of Membership: Garrett Sharpe is an ecology graduate student who studies marine microbiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. When he is not on a research vessel collecting bacteria or studying bacterial interactions in the lab, he leads a hiking group for young adults that takes him all across the South. His poetry is inspired by nature and his personal life, and some of his poems have been published in Pinesong and the local anthology Heron Clan VI. He received the 2020 Ross Andrews Nature Poetry Contest’s Chestnut Oak Award.
Vice President of Communications: Michael Dechane is a poet based in the Asheville, NC area. His work has appeared in Image, Southern Poetry Review, Spiritus, Bellingham Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere. Dechane’s forthcoming debut poetry collection, The Long Invisible (Wildhouse), is due out in September 2024. He earned an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Seattle Pacific University in 2018. In 2021, he founded Reify Marketing, a solopreneur consultation and content development venture. Learn more at www.michaeldechane.com or LinkedIn.
Recording Secretary: Kathy Ackerman is the Dean of Arts and Sciences and Writer-in-Residence at Isothermal Community College in Spindale, North Carolina. She lives on a loblolly farm-in-progress in Polk County. Her most recent collection of poems, A Quarrel of Atoms, was a finalist in several contests and won the 2019 Lena Shull Book Award from NCPS. Her other books include Coal River Road, The Heart of Revolution, and three poetry chapbooks.
Treasurer: Bill Griffin has served as Treasurer of NCPS since around the turn of the century. Bill is a small-town family doctor and geriatrician, retired since 2020, and since then he has trained as a certified Southern Appalachian Naturalist and leads walks in the woods. He has authored seven poetry collections, including How We All Fly, forthcoming from The Orchard Street Press in 2023. Bill’s chapbook Snake Den Ridge: A Bestiary (2008, March Street Press) is set in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and illustrated by his wife, Linda French Griffin. In 2012, he spent a week at the NC Zoo as Poet in Residence for the Poetry of Conservation project. Bill invites you to visit his blog, http://griffinpoetry.com, where he features poetry by many Carolina poets as well as personal essays and nature photography.
Adult Contests Director: Ashley Lumpkin is a Georgia-raised, Carolina-based writer, editor, actor, and educator. She is the author of five poetry collections: {} At First Sight, Second Glance, Terrorism and Other Topics for Tea, #AshleyLumpkin, and Genesis. Her book I Hate You All Equally is a collection of conversations from her years as a classroom teacher. A lover of performance as well as the written word, she has been a competing member of the Bull City Slam Team since 2015 and currently serves as its assistant coach. Above all else, Ashley considers herself a teacher, poet, and fryer of food. She is a lover of mathematics and language. She loves you too.
Student Contests Director: Nancy Martin-Young has played with words as an educator, an editor, a reporter, a poet, and a novelist. Nancy’s work has appeared in San Pedro Review, Literary Mama, Belle Rêve, Poetry in Plain Sight, Flying South, and MoonShine Review, among others. She has also published three romantic suspense novels set in Raleigh, Wit and Prattles (a Regency novel spun from Austen), a short story collection entitled Southern Edge, and The Last Girl Standing, a poetry chapbook. Her awards include a Pushcart nomination, honorable mention in the Lena Shull contest for her poetry collection Headstrong, and awards from Pinesong, Kakalak, Flyleaf Books, and the Randall Jarrell competition, as well as novel awards from Romance Writers of America contests. She has been a proud member of NCPS for decades and previously served as membership VP. For more, see www.nancymyoung.com.
At-Large Board Members:
Elaine Bauman is a retired teacher and corporate educator, (BA, English, University of the City of NY; MA, English, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL). As a public school teacher, she created and taught a class in Study Skills and Creative Thinking modeled on her experiences at CPSI (Creative Problem Solving Institute). She worked for Siemens Medical Systems, Illinois, in Training and Development and led quality circles efforts in all departments then transferred to Cary, NC. She continued to present workshops in creative thinking and business writing after her retirement. Elaine has published a chapbook, To Hold it All So Gently, and individual poems in Heron Clan, American Open Mike, and several Old Mountain Press anthologies. Though she’s wild about Billy Collins and other famous poets living and not, her favorite poets and readers are the funshoppers!
Hunt McKinnon is not a poet. He is from another field of study and brings a different perspective to the Board. He is a graduate of Princeton University, where he earned an architecture degree. Hunt received his undergraduate education at N. C. State, where he returned to teaching for almost 20 years. He also taught at ECU concurrently. So if you ask what Hunt has to bring to the Board of Directors of the North Carolina Poetry Society, the answer is three-fold: 1) a business perspective; 2) a deep interest in writing and philosophy; and 3) the ability to explain complicated ideas simply and clearly (but not poetically).