Editor’s Note: For the last five weeks, we’ve profiled South Carolina’s past poet laureates. Here is a look at our current poet laureate, who also is a contributing editor to Charleston Currents. Wentworth curates a monthly South Carolina-related poem in our Palmetto Poem section. S.C. Encyclopedia | Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, on June 3, 1958, Marjory Heath Wentworth is the […]
S.C. Encyclopedia | Bennie Lee Sinclair was born on April 15, 1939, in Greenville to Graham Sinclair and Bennie Ward. While she was in the first grade, her first published poem appeared in a teachers’ magazine. Overwhelmed by the attention she received, she stopped writing poetry and returned to it only after the deaths of her father and her brother. A 1956 graduate of Greenville High School, Sinclair entered Furman University, where she received her B.A. in English and later received the Distinguished Alumni Award in 1996. In 1957 she married Thomas Donald Lewis.
S.C. Encyclopedia | Born in Spartanburg on Feb. 18, 1916, Freeman was the daughter of Henry Beacham and Grace Bailey. She attended elementary and high school in the Spartanburg school system and received her undergraduate degree in English, drama, and Latin from Converse College in 1937. In 1993, she received an honorary doctor of letters degree from St. Andrews Presbyterian College.
S.C. Encyclopedia | Poet, literary critic, translator, children’s author. Ennis Samuel Rees, Jr. was born on March 17, 1925, in Newport, Virginia, to Ennis Samuel and Dorothy Drumwright Rees. He received his A.B. from the College of William and Mary in 1946, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Omicron Delta Kappa and where he received the Botetourt Medal for distinguished scholarship. The same year he married Marion Ensor Lott.
S.C. Encyclopedia | Helen von Kolnitz Hyer was born on Dec. 0, 1896, in Charleston, to George von Kolnitz and Sarah Holmes. She attended Simmons College from 1917 to 1918 and married Edward Hyer in 1921. The couple had four daughters. From childhood she had a love of poetry and memorized poems from a book of nineteenth-century English verse, reciting them to visitors at her grandparents’ home in Mount Pleasant.
S.C. Encyclopedia | Archibald Rutledge was born in McClellanville, South Carolina, on October 23, 1883, the son of Henry Middleton Rutledge III, an army officer, and Margaret Hamilton. Descended from a lineage of notable South Carolinians, Rutledge included among his ancestors John Rutledge, Edward Rutledge, Arthur Middleton, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and Thomas Pinckney.
S.C. Encyclopedia | First visited by Robert Sandford in 1666 while he was reconnoitering the southeastern seaboard of North America for Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, Colleton County was one of three original counties organized in the English province of Carolina in 1682. However, Colleton was divided into three parishes by 1730 (St. Bartholomew’s, St. Paul’s, and St. John’s Colleton), which took over most county responsibilities, including oversight of elections.
S.C. Encyclopedia | The term “hurricane” comes from the West Indian word “huracan,” which means “big wind” and is used to describe severe tropical cyclones in the Atlantic Ocean, Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean Sea, and the eastern Pacific Ocean. In the western Pacific, hurricanes are known as typhoons. The development of a hurricane requires an area of low pressure in a region of favorable atmospheric and oceanic conditions. Ocean temperatures must be near or greater than 80 ̊ F and wind speeds at mid- and upper-levels of the atmosphere must be light.
From the S.C. Encyclopedia | The term “Gullah,” or “Geechee,” describes a unique group of African Americans descended from enslaved Africans who settled in the Sea Islands and Lowcountry of South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina.
The term “Gullah,” or “Geechee,” describes a unique group of African Americans descended from enslaved Africans who settled in the Sea Islands and Lowcountry of South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina. Most of these slaves were brought to the area to cultivate rice since they hailed from the Rice Coast of West Africa, a region that stretches from modern Senegal to southern Liberia.
S.C. Encyclopedia | Born in Blackwood, Spartanburg County, on November 21, 1878, Ibra Blackwood was the son of Charles Blackwood and Louvina Burns. After graduating from Wofford College in 1898, Blackwood read law and was admitted to the bar in 1902. That same year he was elected to the General Assembly, where he represented Spartanburg County for a single term in the House.
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