Kimberly Simms grew up in the milieu of the NC/SC textile industry. Her book of poetry, Lindy Lee: Songs on Mill Hill, addresses the conditions of early-20th-century millworkers in the area.
Most writers-in-residence work in the estate's green caretaker's building during their stay, but because of renovations being done to the cottage, Simms was allowed to have an office in the "Crow's Nest" section of the historic main house.
Her love of the past led to her debut work, a collection of poems titled Lindy Lee: Songs on Mill Hill, created during her stint on the Sandburg property in April 2016. The book also contains the rarely seen photography of sociologist Lewis Hine and gives a voice to textile mill workers from the early 1900s.
"A Little Spinner in the Mollohan Mills, Newberry, S.C." Photos by Lewis Hine: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, National Child Labor Committee Collection.
Simms, who lives in Marietta, SC, with her husband Jeremy and their daughter Jordan, graduated from Furman University with a degree in English and received her Master's degree in the same subject from Clemson University. Her poetry has appeared in literary journals such as the South Carolina Review and the Asheville Poetry Review.
In January, the Friends of Carl Sandburg will announce the 2018 Writer in Residence. The emerging author usually works at the renovated green caretaker's building on the Connemara property, although when Simms wrote Lindy Lee, her office was in the Crow's Nest part of the main house, a space used by Sandburg himself.
The writer-in-residence program was launched in 2010 to help emerging fiction writers and poets and is sponsored by Friends of Carl Sandburg, according to Chief of Visitor Services Sarah Perschall at the Carl Sandburg Home. She and colleagues will announce the 2018 Writer in Residence in January — Sandburg's birthday is January 6 — beginning a landmark year for the estate, aka Connemara, which celebrate its 50th year as a National Historic Site on October 2018.
Simms' idea for her own book came through a workshop she did on writing family-history poems. "Everyone was supposed to bring a photograph, and we were doing an exercise where I had a picture of a woman sitting at a textile mill with a kind of faraway look on her face. I ended up writing the first draft of the first poem called 'First Day at the Mill,' and now it's one of the last poems in the book," she says.
The piece was published by Furman University's Ninety-Six Press in their Millennial Sampler of South Carolina Poetry collection. And so Simms kept going. In her finished work, Lewis Hine's haunting photos appear about every third page, some offering added resonance and others clearly inspiring specific poems, such as one showing a man's grim but resilient face not quite hidden behind a screen of fibers.
in a circle of fire.
a lifetime back I held the clarity of silence.
The North Carolina Writers' Network-West Division features Kimberly Simms on Monday, January 15, 2018, at 5:30pm at the Henderson County Library (301 N. Washington St. in downtown Hendersonville). Following Simms' reading is an open mic for local writers to present their short works between three and five minutes long. For more information, see www.ncwriters-west.org or call 828-697-4725. Simms' book is available at local independent bookstores and at major online retailers or through her website, kimberlysimms.com.
In observance of Martin Luther King Day, the library will be closed on January 15, so the open mic event featuring Kimberly Simms has been moved to the following Monday, January 22. Sign up for the open mic begins at 5:30 and the readings will begin at 6:00 p.m.
Lovely article and poem! Very inspiring. Congratulations!