Camilla native, poet Kathryn Stripling Byer passes away at 72

CAMILLA — Former North Carolina Poet Laureate Kathryn Stripling Byer, a native of Camilla, passed away last week at Mission Hospital in Asheville, N.C., following complications from lymphoma. She was 72.

Celebrations of her life will be held in Camilla Friday at 10 a.m. at Camilla Presbyterian Church, and later in Cullowhee, N.C.

Byer was the daughter of Bernice Campbell Stripling and the late C.M. Stripling and was a 1962 graduate of Mitchell County High School. She earned a degree at Wesleyan College in Macon and later attended the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Byer later taught at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, where she met and married her husband, James Byer.

She is survived by her husband, James, a daughter, Corinna, of Cullowhee, her mother, Bernice Campbell Stripling, brother Charles Stripling and sister-in-law Patsy Stripling, all of Camilla.

“She loved her two homes in the mountains of Cullowhee, and she also loved her Southwest Georgia home,” Charles Stripling, who called his sister ‘Kay,’ told The Albany Herald. “She was one of these few people who was home at both places. She did leave here to go to North Carolina, where she became the poet laureate up there, but she was also home down here. In fact, many of her poems are about this part of the country.”

In 1990, Byer became the poet-in-residence at WCU, UNC-G, Appalachian State University and Lenoire Rhyne College. She also published six books of poetry. She was North Carolina’s poet laureate from 2005 to 2009, the first woman to be honored with the position. In 2012, she was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame.

“I think in the North Carolina Literary community, besides the actual books of poetry she wrote, her real legacy will be how she traveled all over the state pushing poetry — especially to women,” Charles Stripling said. “She wanted to see women step forward and take the initiative. She was a formidable woman who knew what she wanted and knew how to get it.”

In 2012, University of Vermont professor and writer David Huddle wrote in the foreword to “Descent,” Byer’s last book: “A Kay Byer poem is utterly compelling from its opening lines: ‘Now take this, she’d say, her mouth/full of pins — a bird’s tail/of fastenings held tight/against revelation.’ Even those of us who’ve read and loved her work for years scratch our heads and mutter to ourselves, ‘How does she do that?’ The poems in her new book, ‘Descent,’ both embrace and struggle against her heritage as a woman of both the Deep South and the southern mountains. Her work is to be cherished for its beauty, its courage and the gift of its revelation.

“Her poems shine a light that we yearn for here in the darkness of the twenty-first century.”

Visitation will be held Thursday from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at the home of Byer’s mother at 320 Fuller Street in Camilla. The family requests that memorial gifts be made to Stitches on 284 South Harney Street, Mercy Corps, Mana Foodbank or a favorite charity.