27 Views Elizabeth Woodman

Writer Celia Rivenbark reaches back to her high school days to explore the humor and challenges of waiting tables at her small town’s only sit-down restaurant. It served the best food in town, and featured the most elaborate salad bar east of Raleigh. It also came with a sizeable portion of unapologetic Lost Cause nostalgia. It might have been 1974, but social change, and extending a warm welcome to Yankees passing through on their way to Florida, were not necessarily on the menu.



Humorist Celia Rivenbark was born and raised in Teachey, North Carolina, just down the road from Wallace, NC, and Norris’s Restaurant. She began her writing career at age twenty, when she was hired as a reporter and jack-of-all-trades for the Wallace Enterprise. From there she went on to the Wilmington Star News after an editor read a story she wrote for the Enterprise about the rare birth of a mule. She eventually began writing a weekly humor column that became widely syndicated. It continues to this day, but now with a more political bent. Celia is a New York Times best-selling author who has published seven books, including We're Just Like You, Only Prettier; You Can't Drink All Day, If You Don't Start in the Morning; and most recently, Rude Bitches Make Me Tired. She wrote the essay, “Grape Expectations on Highway 17,” for Eno Publishers’s The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food, as well as the the Introduction to Eno Publishers’s anthology, 27 Views of Wilmington: The Port City in Prose & Poetry. Celia has written or co-written a number of plays, including a stage adaptation of “Rude Bitches,” which won Best Original Play at the annual Wilmington Theater Awards, and a rollicking political comedy, “High Voter Turnout,” staged at historic Wilmington’s Thalian Hall in 2023.

Journalist Hal Crowther is a connoisseur of green places. He has a particular reverence for trees, sparing neither effort nor expense to keep the beautiful maples and hickories in his yard as healthy and as upright as possible. When he’s overwhelmed by politics, Hal heads outside. Back inside, he’s still writing up a Menckenian storm about the state of things.



Hal Crowther is the author of six books: An Infuriating American: the Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken, and five collections of essays, including Cathedrals of Kudzu, Gather at the River, and Unarmed But Dangerous. His most recent book, Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers, won the Independent Publishers gold medal for Creative Non-Fiction. Hal was a media editor and critic for Time and Newsweek magazines, a film and drama critic for the Buffalo News, and executive editor of The Spectator in Raleigh. He has several writing credits for film and television. His books and essays, and his syndicated column for the Spectator and the Independent Weekly, have won various prizes, including the H.L. Mencken Writing Award, the Lilian Smith Book Award, and three Pushcart Prizes. He is married to novelist Lee Smith. They live in Hillsborough, North Carolina, surrounded by a yard full of well-tended trees.

Diya Abdo has settled into life in Greensboro, North Carolina. It’s thousands of miles from Jordan, where she, the daughter of Palestinian refugees, was raised. A professor at Guilford College, Diya is working hard to reshape the refugee experience in America. She is challenging university campuses everywhere to step up and host families fleeing war and violence around the world. It stems from her own experience, as well as her belief in radical hospitality and radical accountability. Every Campus a Refuge, the program she founded, is changing hearts and minds.



Diya Abdo is the Lincoln Financial Professor of English at Guilford College in Greensboro, NC. She is a second-generation Palestinian refugee, born and raised in Jordan. Her teaching, research, and scholarship focus on Arab women writers, Arab and Islamic feminisms, and refugee studies. She writes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Her book, American Refuge: True Stories of the Refugee Experience, was selected as a North Carolina Reads 2024 Book. In 2015, Diya founded Every Campus a Refuge (ECAR), which advocates for housing refugee families on college and university campus grounds and supporting them in their resettlement. The flagship chapter at Guilford College has hosted nearly 90 refugees thus far. Diya is the recipient of several awards, including the J.M. Kaplan Fund’s Innovation Prize. Diya contributed her story, “Food and Other Weapons,” to Eno Publishers’ anthology The Carolina Table. She also contributed an essay to 27 Views of Greensboro. She lives in Greensboro with her partner, two daughters, and four cats.

Poet Michael McFee talks about his anticipation of winter ending and spring beginning when he strolls through Coker Arboretum on the UNC–Chapel Hill campus. The harbinger of spring is the First Breath of Spring, also known as Lonicera fragrantissima, or winter honeysuckle—also known as “a gorgeous weed.” Michael talks about his years of visiting the arboretum, “the Central Park” of Chapel Hill, and the importance of paying attention, which is at the heart of all writing.



Michael McFee earned his B.A. (1976) and M.A. (1978) from UNC–Chapel Hill. He left graduate school to work a variety of jobs—editorial assistant, librarian, and freelance journalist among them—while he completed his first book. After it was published, he taught part-time at N.C. State University and  UNC–Greensboro. In the late 1980s, McFee was poet-in-residence at Cornell University, and also at Lawrence University. He began teaching at UNC–Chapel Hill in 1990, where he is now Professor of English in the Creative Writing Program. In 2018, McFee was awarded the North Carolina Award for literature, the state's highest civilian honor.

Much of McFee's work deals with his native North Carolina mountains. His book of poems Earthly (University of Chicago Press, 2001) was co-winner of the Roanoake-Chowan Award for Poetry from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Society, and was an honorable mention for the Poets' Prize; his next collection, Shinemaster (University of Chicago Press, 2006), won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award from the Western North Carolina Historical Association. He also wrote a book of one-line poems, The Smallest Talk (Bull City Press, 2007); That Was Oasis (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2012); We Were Once Here (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2017); and A Long Time to Be Gone (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2022).

Journalist Paul Cuadros has written a lot about the Latino communities of North Carolina. He moved here more than 25 years ago to write about life in Siler City, a small town in the central part of the state that was experiencing a seismic demographic shift. When Paul joined the faculty of the journalism school at UNC–Chapel Hill, he got to know another Latino community, when he headed each day to the lunch counter at Sutton’s Drug Store. There, the cocineros have become as much a Chapel Hill institution as the drug store itself.



Journalist Paul Cuadros is the author of the story “The Cocineros of Franklin Street,” featured in 27 Views of Chapel Hill, published by Eno Publishers. Paul is an award-winning investigative reporter whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Time, and other national and local publications. He has focused on issues of race and poverty in America. In 1999, he won a fellowship with the Alicia Patterson Foundation, one of the most prestigious in journalism, to report on emerging Latino communities in rural poultry-processing towns in the South. The culmination of this reporting was his book, A Home on the Field: How One Championship Team Inspires Hope for the Revival of Small Town America, which tells the story of a predominantly Latino high school soccer team as Siler City grapples with Latino immigration.

A Home on the Field was the summer reading selection at UNC–Chapel Hill in 2009, as well as at other universities in North Carolina and beyond.

A professor of journalism at UNC–Chapel Hill, Paul is co-recipient of the 2006 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Journalism Award for his contribution to the radio series “North Carolina Voices: Understanding Poverty,” broadcast on WUNC. He has won the National Association of Hispanic Journalists Award for Online Reporting, and the UNC Diversity Award in 2012 for his work on campus, opening doors for minority students, faculty, and staff.

He was involved in a documentary film and episodic series based on his book, chronicling the lives of Latino youth on the soccer team he coaches in Siler City. He is working on his second book on migration.

It’s that time of year when we remember Hillsborough’s favorite self-taught mortician, RWB Latta (aka writer Allan Gurganus). Now retired, he offered trick-or-treaters a coffin full of candy, and his sales pitch promising deeply discounted and artistic funeral services, with examples galore of his work. To clinch the deal, he treated potential clients to a mash-up of skits, full of fright and politics and frightful politics. The crowds couldn’t get enough. 500 souls lined up each year. For more than a quarter-century on All Hallow’s Eve, the spookiest and most overrun place in town was the Latta funeral home, which took possession of writer Allan Gurganus’s otherwise-respectable bungalow.



Novelist Allan Gurganus has been delighting reading audiences for decades. His books include The Practical Heart, Plays Well With Others, Local Souls, White People, and Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, which has been adapted for both stage and screen. Many of his short stories have been published in The New Yorker. He recently published The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus, and is at work on a new novel, The Erotic History of a Country Baptist Church.