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Each April, we celebrate how poetry enriches our literature and culture and illuminates the experiences and emotions of our lives. Whether inspired by happiness, hardship, or the everyday beauty and power of the natural world, South Carolinians have something to say through poetry.
“I am where pain has never been,
And all my joys awake and sing
With yonder, Carolina Wren
Just caroling and caroling!”
- An excerpt from “A Carolina Wren” by Archibald Rutledge
Humanitas is the literary journal for the Medical University of South Carolina. First produced in 1997, this literary journal shows how the university hospital system is a natural place to look for literature and art – as the arduous and heart-rending situations, frequent to the medical world, trigger creative expression. Medical staff are frequently placed in situations where they feel like Band-Aids applied over large gaping wounds, especially in times when their patients’ sufferings are in ways that they cannot help. Still there are many moments of joy. The selections in this edition reveal a connection between joys and sorrows of life, and in the end offer hope – that in spite of blindness, we begin to see; in spite of pain, we can feel.
Compiled by the South Carolina Arts Commission, this anthology is a collection of poems written by grad school students of all ages across South Carolina interspersed with poetry from professional poets across the Southeast. This anthology reveals the creativity minds within each of us, especially within our children.
On April 25, 1998, historians, collectors, literary scholars, and students met at McKissick Museum on the University of South Carolina’s campus to learn more about the life of the enslaved potter, David “Dave” Drake (ca. 1801- after 1870). The all-day symposium was the first academic forum to discuss not only the pottery of Drake but the political, cultural, and religious environment that shared this poet and master potter. The exhibit, also organized by McKissick Museum, examined Drake’s work as a turner in the pottery factories in Edgefield, South Carolina, for over thirty years. During his prolific career, he produced an array of enormous storage jars, jugs, churns, and pitchers. Used for food storage and food processing on South Carolina farms and plantations, these items held an additional value for their owners: on many of Dave’s ware are incised poetic verses and/or his signature and date. This catalog accompanied the exhibit and includes a full discussion of recent findings along with other essays that contribute to knowledge of Dave Drake and his world.
In honor of South Carolina Tricentennial celebration, Archibald Rutledge, Poet Laureate of South Carolina, wrote this collection of poems about his home state. Rutledge (1883-1973) was born in McClellanville and had family ties to many prominent South Carolina families, including the Rutledges, Middletons, Pinckneys, and Horrys. After retiring as an English professor in Pennsylvania, Rutledge returned to South Carolina after being appointed the state’s first poet laureate in 1934. In his poems, Rutledge depicts the natural beauty of South Carolina inspired by his childhood growing up on his family’s ancestral home of Hampton Plantation in Charleston County.
Hugo Blue, a collection of student writing and drawing, records what it means to experience a terrible hurricane. This anthology informs and reassures others who have to go through a similar disaster. Students who experienced Hurricane Hugo in September 1989, either by being in the path of the storm or by hearing and reading about its destruction, shared their experiences in vivid emotions and descriptions. This anthology was produced in collaboration with the Rural Education Alliance for Collaborative Humanities (REACH), a statewide community of educators who worked together to help make South Carolina schools rich with opportunities for all students to understand their own culture and the culture of others.
In the early 1980s, English instructor Dale Alan Bailes held writing workshops in prisons across South Carolina. While attendance was often inconsistent, Bailes said, “they come and go; I keep a core of 4 at the men’s prison and 3 at the Women’s Correctional Center who attend every class and write poems both in and out of class.” Bailes considered it a privilege to teach these students something about writing, something about putting the pieces of themselves together through using words. The poems written by those incarcerated in South Carolina, full of creativity and hopefully healing, are included in this anthology.
More than 2000 students from across the state will gather at the South Carolina State House on Thursday, April 3rd, 2025, to celebrate reading at the 2025 South Carolina Read-In.
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