27 Views

Elizabeth Woodman

27 Views is the podcast dedicated to exploring the South through writers and stories. Produced in Hillsborough, North Carolina, each episode showcases a writer and his/her storytelling. Featured writers include Jill McCorkle, the late Randall Kenan, Jaki Shelton Green, Daniel Wallace, and Allan Gurganus.

  1. 04/23/2024

    Episode 25: Eating Grape Pie with Humorist Celia Rivenbark

    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.

    26 min
  2. 03/12/2024

    Episode 23: Practicing Radical Hospitality with Diya Abdo

    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.

    26 min
5
out of 5
16 Ratings

About

27 Views is the podcast dedicated to exploring the South through writers and stories. Produced in Hillsborough, North Carolina, each episode showcases a writer and his/her storytelling. Featured writers include Jill McCorkle, the late Randall Kenan, Jaki Shelton Green, Daniel Wallace, and Allan Gurganus.