Alabama's Poet Laureates

April is National Poetry Month in the U.S., and each year I've tried to post a new item on this blog related to Alabama poets and poetry. I also post a number of such items on my Twitter account @ajwright31. I've written about Sara Henderson Hay, who grew up in Anniston. I've done posts on the Anthology of Alabama Poetry published in 1928 and Alabama Horizons, a collection that appeared in 1999. Well-known author Langston Hughes wrote four poems related to Alabama, and I've written about those. I've also posted about Alabama poetry at other times of the year.

This year I thought I'd write something about the state's poet laureate program. In 1930 the Alabama Writers Conclave [now Cooperative] established the post and named Samuel Mintern Peck to it. The following year the legislature formally recognized the poet laureate position by law. Today the AWC nominates and the governor formally makes the appointment. Since 1983 terms have been limited to four years. This person is the official public face of poetry in Alabama. 

Below are the state's poet laureates with term dates, life dates, and links for more information. The black and white photos were taken from the 2000 anthology of laureate poems noted at the end of the post. I originally wanted to include an image of a book by each person, but decided against that to keep the length reasonable. 

Oh, and two Alabama cities have recently named poet laureates. Birmingham's is Salaam Green and Mobile's is Charlotte Pence. These positions are funded by the Alabama State Council on the Arts. 

1930-1938

Samuel Mintern Peck [1854-1938]

1954-1958

Mary B. Ward [1890-1985]

1959-1974

Bert Henderson [1903-1976]

1975-1982

William Young Elliott [1902-1976]

1983-1987

Carl P. Morton [1920-1994]

1988-1991

Morton D. Prouty, Jr. [1918-1998]

1992-1995

Ralph Hammond [1916-2010]

1995-1999

Helen Blackshear [1911-2003]

1999-2003

Helen Norris [1916-2013]

2004-2012

Sue Brannon Walker [ca. 1940-]

2013-2016

Andrew Glaze [1920-2016]

2018-2022

Jennifer Horne

2022-2026

Ashely M. Jones 

Sara Henderson Hay, Poet

Last year for National Poetry Month  I wrote a couple of blog posts about  anthologies of poems by Alabama authors. One focused on Alabama Poetry published in 1945 and edited by Louise Crenshaw Ray. Another looked at the Anthology of Alabama Poetry 1928 published by the Alabama Writers Conclave. In this post for the annual poetry celebration, I want to discuss a particular poet with state connections, Sara Henderson Hay.

She was born on November 13, 1906 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but grew up in Anniston. Her parents were Daisy Henderson [Baker] Hay and Ralph Watson Hay. The 1940 U.S. Census gives Daisy's birthplace as Alabama and the year as about 1878; she died in Anniston on August 27, 1966. Ralph was also born in Pittsburgh on February 9, 1873, and died there on February 23, 1938. Hay's parents were married in Anniston on November 15, 1905.

The family seems to have done a lot of back-and-forth between Pennsylvania and Alabama. According to his Find-A-Grave listing, her father was a superintendent with Samuel W. Hay's Sons , & Manufacturers Light & Heat Co. and salesman with Oil Well Supply Co., all in Pittsburgh. Ralph's father was Samuel W. Hay, so presumably that one was the family business. Since Anniston had many metal and pipe industries, Ralph may have lived in both places and travelled back and forth for business interests. 

Sara received her education before college in Anniston. In the 1880's one of Anniston's founders Samuel Noble established two private schools affiliated with the Episcopal Church, Noble Institutes for Boys and Girls. Established in 1886, the Noble Institute for Girls was located at the corner of 11th Street and Leighton Avenue.  The boarding school closed in 1914, and the building later burned. The day school, which Hay presumably attended, closed in 1922. In that same year a new brick Anniston High School opened, which Hay attended. 

At age 10 she had published a poem about golf in Judge Magazine and in high school published in the Anniston Star newspaper. She continued writing and publishing poetry while in college. She left Anniston to enroll at Brenau College in Georgia from 1926 until 1928, then moved to New York City and graduated from Columbia University in 1931. 

Hay worked in the Rare Book Department at Charles Scribner's Sons publisher from 1935 until 1942. After Columbia she had started with the company  as a secretary in the editorial offices and then worked in the firm's bookstore. During this period her poems began to appear in various magazine and anthologies. While there she was an editor on Stevenson's Home Book of Shakespeare Quotations, published by Scribner's in 1937. 

In 1935 while at Scribner's Hay was able to tour Europe as secretary to Gladys Baker, a syndicated newspaper columnist. Baker had moved to the Magic City in 1926 to begin working for the Birmingham News. Small world, isn't it? I've yet to discover how the two women met, but on the tour they met with Pope Pius XI, Mussolini, Ataturk and other notables. 

Hay resumed work at Scribner's, continued writing poetry and published poetry and fiction reviews for the Saturday Review of Literature. In 1939 her second book was published by Alfred A. Knopf, another major New York publisher. I have included a number of images from This, My Letter below, including two from her "To My Small Son" series about an imaginary child. 

In 1938 and 1940 she recorded 28 of her poems at the City College of New York; they are listed at that link. In 1953 they were copied for the Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature at the Library of Congress. 

During the 1950's and 1960's Hay continued to publish collections of poetry. The Delicate Balance [Scribner] appeared in 1951 and The Stone and the Shell [University of Pittsburgh Press] in 1959. In 1963 Doubleday published The Story Hour; see some comments about it below. Doubleday also published her final book The Footing on the Earth in 1966.

The 1951 collection The Delicate Balance won the Edna St. Vincent Millay Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. The Kentucky Poetry Review published an issue devoted to her work in 1980. 

Hay was married twice. Her first husband was Raymond Holden [1894-1972], a novelist, poet and publisher she married in 1937. Hay was the third of his four wives and the union apparently did not last long. On January 27, 1951, she married Nikolai Lopatnikoff, and they remained together until his death in 1976. He was a composer, and you can see a photo of him in the classroom taken by famed photographer W. Eugene Smith here. He taught music composition at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh from 1945 until 1969. I have found no indication that Hay had any children. 

Sara Henderson Hay died on July 7, 1987, in Pittsburgh. Her death was covered by the New York Times. She and her second husband are buried in Homewood Cemetery in that city. 

I have found these two items of scholarship on Hay's work:

Joyce, Christa Mastrangelo. "Contemporary Women Poets and the Fairy Tale." Fairy Tales Reimagined: Essays on New Retellings (2009): 31-43.

Wilson, Dorothy Ann. Irony and Satire in the Poetry of Sara Henderson Hay. Diss. Indiana State College (Pa.), 1964.

I also found an essay by Alabama's eighth poet laureate, Helen F. Blackshear, "The Poetry of Sara Henderson Hay" in her collection Southern Smorgasbord [1982]. 

Images and some more commentary are below. I have included many from Hay's second poetry collection, since that is the only book of hers I own. I've also included one related to a mystery I've yet to solve. 

 I looked at Ancestry.com and found a Michael Actis-Grand in the 1930 U.S. Census. He was 37, living in Yonkers, New York. His profession? He was a hair dresser who owned a beauty shop. Could this be the Michael of this dedication?

Hay was obviously still married to Holden when this book was published. 

As this page demonstrates, by 1939 Hay's poems had appeared in a wide variety of publications. 

I can sympathize with the situation in this sonnet. Once when very young our daughter Becca acted like this "Beloved Sphinx" as Dianne and I, her brother, the photographer and other parents and children waiting tried to coax a smile from her. 

This collection contains fairy tales retold in sonnet form. The foreword is by poet Miller Williams. Reprinted from the 1963 Doubleday edition.

This special issue of Sagetrieb published in 2000 featured Hay on the cover in a photo taken in 1973. 

Alabama marriage certificate for Willa Baker Hay. Note the address as 1124 Quintard Avenue in Anniston, the same location identified below as Hay's "childhood home" and listed in various sources as her mother Daisy's residence for some years.

 In one obituary for Ralph Hay his children are listed as "Ray H. Holden; Willa Baker Hay". Just a simple error? Yet here's a marriage certificate for Willa listing her parents as Sara's parents and the Quintard address [see below]. At this time, June 1939, Sara was in New York City still working for Scribner's. 

And what about Ray? Beats me; by this time I gave up in confusion. More research is required to sort all this out. 

."

This Anniston newspaper article notes Hay's visit in 1950 to the city to visit her mother in her childhood home at 1124 Quintard Avenue. She also gave a talk to the European Study Club. 

Source: Anniston Star 22 October 1950 

Anthology of Alabama Poetry 1928

The Alabama Writers' Conclave was founded in 1923 and is one of the oldest organizations for authors in the U.S. Today it's known as the Alabama Writers' Cooperative. The AWC chooses the state's Poet Laureate, a position created by the state legislature in 1931; the choice is certified by the governor. The current Laureate is Jennifer Horne. You can read about that program and see a list of all laureates here. 

Before the AWC was even a decade old, the group published The Anthology of Alabama Poetry 1928. I have included the table of contents and the biographical notes below since this book is not widely available. WorldCat.org lists only 57 libraries having it in their collections; several of those are in Alabama. Bookfinder.com, which aggregates the inventories of hundreds of used and rare book dealers, turns up no copies for sale. 

The collection was published by Ernest Hartsock of the Bozart Press in Atlanta. The forward was written by Frances R. Durham, President of the Conclave. See more on her below. Hartsock and his press were apparently significant in the South's literary world; a master's thesis "Ernest Hartsock and the Southern Literary Renaissance" was written by Monroe F. Swilley at Georgia State College in 1969.

This anthology is something of a snapshot of the poetry landscape in Alabama at the time of publication. Included is "A Biographical Dictionary of Alabama Poets" that offers brief entries on most of the men and women included. There are some 80 poets in this collection; the majority are women. Note how many of these individuals were also members of other national, regional and local writers' groups, art guilds, etc. 

I haven't reproduced any of the poems, but the titles will give you an idea of the sorts of things included. Lots of poems about the natural world and various emotions appear in these pages. Some are poems related to Alabama themes, such as Wallace M. Sloan's "Birmingham".  Many poems are pale, precious, sentimental things produced by writers untouched by the modernism gripping poetry and literature and the rest of the arts at the time. Some readers might add, "Untouched by talent, too" and so it goes.   

As far as I know, this anthology was the first of only three ever published of Alabama poets that attempted state-wide coverage. The other two are Louise Crenshaw Ray's Alabama Poetry (1945) and Ralph Hammond's Alabama Poets: A Contemporary Anthology (1990). 

On his massive web site "History of Birmingham Poetry" Craig Legg has much to say about the AWC and the contents of this anthology. 

I have added a few other author achievements and information below the directory images that follow.   

I have been unable to find any information about Funk, who created this Art Deco illustration. He is not included in the biographical directory. The work seems a bit racy for a 1928 publication related to Alabama poetry, but maybe  the easily offended didn't see it. 

Emily Campbell Adams is described as the "Author of very clever and timely verses Plantation Prohibition", but I can find no information on a collection of that name.

The collection Flowers from the Foothills by Mary Chase Cornelius is a chapbook of 28 pages.

Francis R. Durham was President of the Conclave at the time of publication. 

Scottie McKenzie Frasier's Fagots of Fancy is a 1920 collection of some 60 pages with an introduction by Alabama novelist and playwright Helen S. Woodruff. You can read the collection here. The title page notes the poems are "In Free Verse." In 1922 her second collection Things That Are Mine appeared; read it here.

Kate Downing Ghent's 42-page chapbook A String of Pearls and Other Poems was published in 1925. I could not find information on Sips of Cheer.

Unfortunately, I found no information about or copy of Annie Shillito Howard's "The Vision of Bienville", a poem written for Mobile's bi-centennial celebrated in 1902. Perhaps it was published in a local newspaper. 

Lawrence Lee was born in Gadsden and graduated from Sidney Lanier High School in Montgomery. He attended the University of Virginia, graduating in 1924, then settled in New York for editorial work. This opportunity apparently led to his editorship of Sea Stories and Sport Story Magazine. Both publications were part of the Street and Smith empire, which published dime novels, pulp magazines and other materials between 1855 and 1959. 

The FictionMagsIndex shows several poems Lee published in magazines in the 1920's and later. Lee may have returned to Virginia; he published two poetry collections in the 1930's with connections to that state. The first was Summer Goes On in 1933 and then Monticello and Other Poems in 1937. Both were issued by Scribner's, a major New York imprint; they publish Hemingway, for instance. 

At the time of this anthology's publication, Maud Lindsay was one of its best known authors. A childhood friend of Helen Keller's, she founded in Florence the state's first free kindergarten in 1898. She wrote a number of books of stories and poems for children, much of it reflecting her own experiences. The Online Books Page has links to full texts of several of her books.

The directory describes Mitylene Owen McDavid as a painter and the author of "numerous" published books. The only one I could find was Culinary Crinkles: Tested Recipes issued by the Woman's Guild of Birmingham's Church of the Advent in 1919. 

Kate Slaughter McKinney wrote at least two novels as well as poetry that appeared in her own collections and anthologies, much of it while living in her native Kentucky. She married a superintendent of the L&N railroad and was living in Montgomery at the time this anthology appeared.

John Trotwood Moore [1858-1929] was born in Marion, Alabama, but is more closely associated with Tennessee where he was state archivist and librarian for the last decade of his life. A Confederate veteran, Moore authored novels, short stories and poetry. He was a Lost Cause proponent; you can read his "A Ballad of Emma Sansom" here.

Charles J. Quirk [1889-1962] published several collections of poetry including the two mentioned, Sails on the Horizon [1926, 44pp] and Candles in the Wind [1931, 102pp].

Louise Crenshaw Ray [1890-1956] continued to write poetry and published four collections often with poems featuring Alabama themes and settings. She also edited the 1945 collection Alabama Poetry featuring work by members of the Poetry Society of Alabama, founded in Birmingham in 1929. You can find an extensive discussion of her life and poetry at Craig Legg's History of Birmingham Poetry. 

Eugenia Bragg Smith is buried in Oakwood Cemetery in Montgomery. Her poem "The Coquette" in the form of a villanelle about a butterfly can be found here.The bio note here observes, "She is also a successful writer of Greeting Card Verse". Such poetry is often unsigned and a literary production so ephemeral most of its practitioners are unknown. 

Hudson Strode [1892-1976] was a legendary English professor and creative writing teacher at the University of Alabama beginning in 1916. He published a wide range of novels, non-fiction, and poetry. Strode also taught many student who went on to become writers such as Helen Norris and Lonnie Coleman.

Alicia Joel Towers wrote Psychology and Mechanics for Writing [Birmingham: A.H. Cather, 1924] and Piney Woods Poetry [1929, also Cather].

Clement R. Wood had a very prolific and very strange writing career that continued until his death in 1950. He graduated from law school at the University of Alabama, and by 1919 had published his first book. This one was followed by a steady stream of novels, poetry collections, biographical profiles, historical works and more. He also edited a number of books, including a popular rhyming and craft handbook for poets. Wood wrote or edited a number of the popular Little Blue Books, including the classic The Art of Kissing. You can read more about Wood here.  

Nena Wilson Wright's Birmingham and Other Poems appeared in 1926. The title poem "Birmingham" can be read here along with other poems about the city. 

Martha Young [1862-1941] was already well-known as a regional author by the time this anthology appeared. Between 1901 and 1921 she had published eight books of tales, fables, songs and stories based on her life as a girl growing up in Alabama. She was admired, at the time anyway, for her use of African-American dialect. You can read a typical title, When We Were Wee: Tales of the Ten Grandchildren published in 1912 here.

This history of the AWC's early years was published in 1993.

The Poetry Society of Alabama was founded on February 7, 1929, in Birmingham. I don't know how long it lasted, but it must have been in pretty good shape when this anthology was published in 1945. The Alabama State Poetry Society was founded in 1968, so I presume the earlier organization disappeared before then.