Ice on a Hot Stove

Book excerpt: For more than a century, Converse College has held a unique position in the literary history of South Carolina. Converse graduate Julia Mood Peterkin is the only South Carolinian to be selected for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction (1929), and alumna and poet Ellen Bryant Voigt, a National Book Award and Pulitzer finalist, and a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant recipient, has been credited with starting the low-residency MFA model for graduate writing students. These writers, plus a significant number of others over the last century, have been hallmark authors in the literary history of this state. With the start of the Converse Low Residency MFA in the earlier part of the twenty-first century, the only low-residency MFA in South Carolina, Converse has added a new chapter to South Carolina’s literary history. This anthology highlights the last decade of outstanding poetry presented in the Converse MFA program and produced by our program faculty, visiting faculty, and graduates.