In This Waning Light

About the Book

Elizabeth Burgess was lucky enough to have Dr. J.J. Van Noppen for English at Appalachian State Teachers College. (now University) He encouraged her to write. She did not take writing seriously until the early 1980’s when she returned from teaching in Baumholder Germany and was selected to attend The Writing Project at UNC-Pembroke. The project was based on the Berkeley, California Model. She received the Most Improved Award at the end of the project. This spurred her to write poetry and short stories and since her retirement from teaching she has written 3 novellas, 2 poetry collections, 1 childrens book with another in the works. She taught her 1st & 2nd graders to write stories. She believes we are never too young or to old to write for pleasure or publication.

About the Author

This is Elizabeth Burgess’s second book of poetry. Her first is Meadow Keep: A Celebration of the History, Folklore and Superstitions of Herbs, told in poetry and prose. She calls this collection “life poems.” Burgess spent 25 years teaching in North Carolina schools, including Durham, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, and Scotland County. In 1994 she received the Terry Sanford Award for Creativity in Teaching. She was a member of Delta Kappa Gamma Society International for Key Women Educators, Omicron Chapter in Scotland County, North Carolina. She spent 5 years teaching for the Department of Defense Dependents Schools in Schweinfurt, Baumholder, and Nuremberg, Germany. In the Far East she lived on the huge 7th Fleet Navy Base at Yokosuka, Japan. In 1978, she returned to Germany with her 5-year-old son, Chris. They lived on a small dairy farm in Rohrbach, Germany. She taught in Baumholder, and Chris went to school there. During her years abroad, she visited schools in Germany; Moscow, Russia; and Yokosuka, Japan. After her retirement in 1995 she turned her attention to writing. Her first book was Prison Camp Road, mainly fiction, and set in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Next came A Day In Cascilla, fiction mixed with nonfiction set in the 1930s and ’40s in rural Arkansas and Mississippi. The Twins Café, set in the 1950s in rural North Carolina, is a work of fiction based on the historical fact of the January 1958 clash between the Ku Klux Klan and the Lumbee Indians. Guess who won? Everyone remembers this and continues to talk about it. She has published work in the N.C. Poetry Society’s 60th year anthology Here’s to the Land, Harp Strings, Main Street Rag, Pinesong Awards, Gravity Hill, Potato Eyes, South by Southeast, haiku, Hungry for Home short-short stories, The Book of American Traditions short-short stories, and other anthologies. Burgess held a state office in the N.C.P.S. during Robert Collins’ presidency. At 83 she continues to write and publish. Her next publication will be her second children’s book, set in the 1950s and located in the foothills town of Hudson, N.C., scene of her first book, Prison Camp Road. Titled The Turkey Shoot, it will be a book mainly for boys ages 6–12.