Quitman Marshall

Beaufort Bookstore and the nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center will host an evening with poet and writer Quitman Marshall, author of Swampitude: Escapes with the Congaree, on Monday, November 27, at 5:00 p.m. at the Beaufort Bookstore (2127 Boundary St #15, Beaufort).

This event is free and open to the public. Books will be available for sale and signing. Seating is limited; please call to reserve your spot: 843-525-1066.

About SWAMPITUDE

“Swampitude is the kind of book I look for…. I love its mix of the land and the personal and the philosophical. It’s marvelous….”–Joe Mackall, editor, River Teeth Journal

A Finalist for the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Book Prize, Swampitude explores and meditates upon the social, literary, historical, personal, ecological, psychological, and political meanings of a swamp: swamps in general, and a particular swamp, the Congaree in the center of South Carolina, which has been designated a United Nations Biosphere Reserve and is now Congaree National Park.

A magical place of escape and fecundity, the Congaree Swamp, emblematic of all such often forbidding terrains, is the largest old-growth river bottom forest in the United States. It is in the American South and has filtered much of that region’s history. The Congaree is also lucky to have gathered an environmental movement, escaped the fate of most similar wetlands, and to continue to flood, drain, and provide refuge for all creatures in need of it. This book celebrates the survival, the stories, and the continuance of such places.

Born in South Carolina, Quitman Marshall grew up in the swamp. He has published five books of poetry, including You Were Born One Time (2014), which won the SC Poetry Archives Book Prize. A winner of the Writers Exchange Award sponsored by Poets and Writers, Inc., and the founding coordinator of the Literary Series at the Spoleto Festival, USA, he has lived in Barcelona, Washington, DC, Amherst, MA, New York City, the suburbs of Paris, and presently in Beaufort, SC, with his family. He works as a writer, editor, translator, and teacher.

Learn more about the nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center at www.patconroyliterarycenter.org.