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The creative writing program at UNC-CH is divided into two primary tracks, with occasional other tracks. The two biggies are, of course, fiction and poetry (occasional genres include creative nonfiction and children's literature). Although someone occasionally crosses over from one genre to the other, a student generally follows one track, and the two groups tend to go their separate ways. This site, then, features the poets of 1999. The name of the site, however, has relevance to more than just the year. The course title is ENGL099 and it spans two semesters (so there is an ENGL099A and an ENGL099B). The stuffy course listing makes no distinction between fiction and poetry; this site, however, does.

Why, when there are perhaps thousands of sites dedicated to contemporary poetry, have we found it incumbent on us to post ours? The move to do so has its roots in a habit begun a number of years ago by one of the poetry classes: making the class's poems public. In the past, classes have put together small anthologies of their work to give out to friends and just to have later. This year, a class member suggested the uncommon idea of buying space on Chapel Hill Transit. New York City transit runs a similar series called "Poetry In Motion." Because we're college students, very much making the transition from the academic to the real world, we're calling our series Poets in Transit. Please read more about this project, including the poems we placed on the buses.

We decided also that it might be a neat idea to post a collection of our work on a web server seen by thousands of people daily. The idea behind this web site is that we are a group of young (and growing) poets who have worked together for a full school year, and that seeing a mass of our work together might be interesting to somebody. In any case, this site documents the creative utterances of a small group of us in North Carolina (with diverse backgrounds, however). We hope that it is valuable as a representative sampling of the poetry not only of the southern US, but of, to a lesser degree, our generation.


Maintained by Daryl L. Houston