On March 21st, 2025, nationally-renowned poet and Pulitzer Prize nominee Rodney Jones will headline the 2025 Upcountry Literary Festival.
A native of Alabama, Jones will also receive the seventh William “Singing Billy” Walker Award for Lifetime Achievement in Southern Letters, an award named for the Union County-born songwriter and arranger known for his arrangement of “Amazing Grace,” beloved the world over for more than one hundred-fifty years. Among past Walker Award recipients are Robert Morgan, Bobbie Ann Mason, and the late Fred Chappell. Jones has also received the Harper Lee Award, Alabama’s highest literary honor.
Jones’ books of verse include Salvation Blues, Village Prodigies, and Elegy for the Southern Drawl. In fact, Jones’ keynote address, to be delivered Friday afternoon at 3:15pm, will deal with the subject matter of the latter collection, the demise of authentic Southern speech. Jones’ work is noted for its lyricism and its hard, unflinching look at religion, death, and poverty in his native state. The critic David Baker, in Poetry magazine, called him “one of the best, most generous, and most brilliantly readable poets currently making poems in America.” His latest book is Alabama: Poems.
A long-time professor of English at the University of Southern Illinois in Carbondale, Jones is now retired in New Orleans.
Two other poets will make their Upcountry Literary Festival debuts this year. Tim Conroy, a South Carolina native, resides in Florida. His collection Theologies of Terrain has been praised by the likes of Ron Rash and John Lane. Pat Riviere-Seel’s latest work is Because I Did Not Drown, a collection of poems and personal observations on life experiences. A native of Shelby, North Carolina, Riviere-Seel published her first book of poems in 1994, No Turning Back Now. Prose writer Michael Cody from Eastern Tennessee State University will make his second appearance at the festival. He has published three works of fiction, including the story collection Twilight Reel and the forthcoming literary mystery The Streets of Nashville. Cody, also an accomplished musician, was born and brought up in South Carolina. Cody, Riviere-Seel, and Conroy will take the stage alongside Festival stalwarts Tally Johnson of Chester, South Carolina, and Rieppe Moore from Elizabethtown, Tennessee. Johnson is a historian and master teller of ghost stories. His books include Creek Walking and best-selling tomes on ghostly encounters in the Carolinas. Moore has seen his poems published in venues throughout the South, including the prestigious Still: The Journal and The Petigru Review. He is the author of a chapbook.
Local-grown talent will also be represented that weekend. Freddie Vanderford, an award-wining blues legend, will play for audiences on Friday afternoon to close out the first day of the festival. Vanderford has performed at every live festival since its inception in 2011. On Saturday, the festival will conclude with a performance by The Hogback Mountain Band, a group of accomplished women from the area.
This year, the festival will take place at Union Carnegie Library, due to renovations being done on USC-Union’s Main Building. On Friday, March 21st, presentations begin at 1pm and end at 5pm; on Saturday, March 22nd, they begin at 9am and end at 12pm. The event is free and open to the public. Authors will have copies of their books for sale at the festival.
The Upcountry Literary Festival was created in 2011 as a reminder to young and old alike of the importance of the written word in an age of ever-encroaching technology.
For more information about the festival, please contact Festival director Randy Ivey at rivey@mailbox.sc.edu or 864-441-7279.
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