Wake: Up to Poetry
"The act of poetry is a rebel act."
Supporting Western North Carolina After Hurricane Helene
Wake Forest University Press will donate 20% from all website sales for the months of October and November 2024 to
The Community Foundation of Western North Carolina for their Hurricane Helene relief efforts. Established in 1978, The Community Foundation of Western North Carolina serves 18 counties and is currently distributing funds to frontline nonprofit partners in affected communities.
“Wake Forest University Press has a long association with the mountains of North Carolina,” said WFU Press director Jefferson Holdridge. “We published a book entitled
The Shack (2015), containing reflections by our poets on their time spent in the foothills and the mountains of the Blue Ridge. We are saddened by what has happened during Hurricane Helene and hope that our donation gives some relief to the people in the area we love so much.”
Additionally, we encourage direct donations to the many organizations assisting on the ground in the relief efforts, including:
Other organizations are collecting supplies of household products, non-perishable food items, blankets, winter clothing, and more.
We recognize recovery will be a long journey, and we find hope in the stories of resilience, community, and mutual aid. As we continue to make sense of the way forward, we are reminded of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poem “In the year of the hurricane…”, originally published in her collection The Brazen Serpent (1995), which concludes:
The high-waterline scored in rock
begins our lives again.
Below it lace of tidemarks
washed like nets, with trimming
of cork and foam, the trailing skirts
lapping and overlapping,
are shelved like the webbed shawls
of the child wrapped and cradled,
fostered after the storm.
– Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, from “In the year of the hurricane…”
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