USCB Student Selected for Prestigious Writers' Workshop
Edra Stephens is the first USCB student to be selected as a manuscript fellow at writer’s
retreat “The Watering Hole.” USCB English major, Gullah poet and novelist Edra Stephens has been selected as a manuscript fellow for a prestigious writers’ workshop. She will join the tenth annual winter retreat of The Watering Hole, “a southern-based vanguard who builds Harlem Renaissance-style spaces in the contemporary South.” The purpose of the retreat is “to cultivate and inspire kinship between poets of color from all spoken and written traditions.”
The retreat begins Dec. 26 and will be held in McCormick, SC. After this, Stephens, who is a senior at USCB, will return for two more week-long workshops during 2023. She will bring to the group selected poems and a section of her first novel, “Born White Dying Black.” Her coursework at USCB includes a concentration in Creative Writing, and “Born White Dying Black” is her senior thesis.
It is about her experiences growing up with her adoptive parents, who are Black, and her complex feelings for her birth mother, who is white. Her poetry, which she has been honing in writing workshops at USCB, explores her childhood in the close-knit, rural Gullah community on Hilton Head Island in the 1970s and her journey to adulthood.
“I was born in the Florence Crittenton home for Girls in Charleston,” Stephens said, “I found my birth mother a few years ago after a relative reached out to me through Ancestry.com.”
Stephens has been published in recent issues of USCB’s literary magazine, The Pen.
“Her literary voice is strong and daring and backs away from nothing,” said Dr. Ellen Malphrus, faculty advisor for The Pen and Stephen’s senior thesis director.
Stephen’s unflinching poetry and prose come as a bit of a surprise. In person, she is warm but a bit reserved.
“I was afraid of how my classmates might take the strong language, but my professors encouraged me to read my work out loud,” she said.
Stephens’ path to becoming a professional writer has been long: she initially studied accounting and worked for years for county and municipal business offices, rising to the level of director before deciding to step away to finish her college degree. Drs. Ellen Malphrus, Mollie Barnes, and other faculty encouraged her to pursue her lifelong love of writing. From her first creative writing course, she was hooked.
Stephens has set her sites high and recently made a list of writing honors and awards she aspires to.
“One day I want to be South Carolina’s poet laureate,” she said.
The Watering Hole is a good first step: the group has its roots in Cave Canem, a writers retreat hosted by Dr. Kwame Dawes, editor of Prairie Schooner, with sessions led by National Book Award winner Nikky Finney, International Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent inductee Patricia Smith, and co-founder of Affrilachian Poets Frank X Walker.