Longleaf Press Announces 2007 Chapbook Award Winner

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
AUGUST 10, 2007
MARIA SIKORYAK-ROBINS
DIRECTOR OF UNIVERSITY PUBLICATIONS

FAYETTEVILLE, NC—Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin’s poetry chapbook titled Patriate won Methodist University’s 2007 Longleaf Press Chapbook Award.

A business writer and editor from Cullowhee, N.C., Cabanis-Brewin writes for a variety of publications on business topics, and has been co-editor or co-author of several award-winning business books. Her poetry has been published in The Nomad, the Atlanta Review, and Appalachian Heritage, as well as on the North Carolina Arts Council’s Web site. Cabanis Brewin’s work has also appeared in the anthologies Tree Magic (SunShine Press, 2004), The Gift of Experience (Atlanta Review, 2005), Immigration, Emigration, Diversity (Chapel Hill Press, 2005), and in the forthcoming anthology The Moveable Nest (Helicon Nine Press, 2007), edited by Marilyn Kallet and North Carolina Poet Laureate Kathyrn Stripling Byer. She was a finalist in the Atlanta Review's poetry competition in 2000 and 2005, and in the 2000 Greensboro Awards.

Patriate is Cabanis-Brewin’s love letter to her home ground: a presently unspoiled mountain cove in the Southern Appalachian Mountains. The outside world—in the form of rapacious developers, world politics, and other aspects of the larger community—is present in the poems but always less important than the relationship she feels to the ecosystem of Blackbird Branch. Says poet R.T. Smith, editor of Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee University Review, “At once wild and disciplined, [Cabanis-Brewin] is a trustworthy guide ‘around the weedrank barnyard,’ ‘into the tunnel of rhododendron’ and beyond ‘the dark iris of the mind.’ You come too.”

She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English with a professional writing concentration, and graduated Summa Cum Laude from Western Carolina University. She has studied poetry in seminars and master classes with a number of poets, notably Kathyrn Stripling Byer, Cathy Smith Bowers, B.H. Fairchild, Jane Hirshfield, and R.T. Smith.

The contest was open to residents of North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, Virginia, Georgia, and Florida who have not yet published a full-length collection of poetry.

The chapbook will soon be available for purchase on www.amazon.com. Readings are being scheduled at Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville, N.C., City Lights Bookstore in Sylva, N.C., and other venues in Western North Carolina. For more information, contact Robin Greene, professor of English, at (910) 630-7110, or visit www.methodist.edu/longleaf.