It’s no understatement to say that I’d been waiting for years for the Piedmont Laureate program to return to creative non-fiction so that I might be eligible to apply. In those years I’ve been engaged in other volunteer efforts seeking to promote writing, reading, and literacy, which I see as fundamental to democracy, not to mention to our general well-being and our ability to empathize with those who are different from us.
So, who am I? Well, first of all I’m going to admit that I went to Duke as an undergraduate. I know I’ve now lost half of you; I’m sorry. I remember when I first moved back to The Triangle (from the San Francisco Bay Area), a neighbor whose house could have been considered a living monument to Carolina pulled me aside to say: “Steven, I have no problem accepting that you’re gay, but I’ll never accept the fact that you went to Duke.” Eighteen years later, Sandra and I still laugh about that first encounter, and I’ve told her—as I’ll write here: “Some of my best friends are Tar Heels.”
I wrote my first book, Dancing Against the Darkness, soon after the HIV/AIDS epidemic emerged in the mid-1980s. In that book, I told the stories of nearly a dozen individuals—gay and straight; male and female; white, brown, and black—who had the courage to share their personal lives with me and many a reader. By the time I completed the manuscript, most of them had succumbed to the virus, and I realized the importance of capturing and safeguarding the stories of those who are most vulnerable. That remains a core part of why I write today.
Since then I’ve written six (or is it seven?) additional books. In 2021, Stupid Things I Won’t Do When I Get Old was published; that book is a memoir about my late parents. I was originally convinced they just kept making one wrong decision after another that made their lives smaller and less connected. I started to keep a list. My dad refused to get a hearing aid, which meant that he could not hear his family or friends. My mother made her own refusal, not giving up the car keys, even when she kept hitting other cars (fortunately, they were all parked at the time). I, along with my siblings, tried to reason with them, but to no avail. I declared that I’d learned all the lessons and that I’d never be like them! Well, it’s now more than a decade later and I’ve come to see how much I’ve become like them, sometimes now, doing some of the same stupid things. Argh! As I wrote at the end of that book, they did as well as they could, which is all any of can do. And my biggest lesson? Learning greater compassion.
My next book is titled, The Joy You Make: Finding the Silver Linings in Good Times and Bad, and it will be published this coming September. I won’t write too much about that now but suffice it to say it’s about my journey—our journey—to find light, love, laughter, connection, and joy in these troubling and turbulent times. And yes, I believe there’s hope.
[Do you want to buy books online and support your local bookstore? Well, you can do that through Bookshop.org. They have raised more than $30 million for independent bookstores.]
Let me circle back to why I had hoped to serve as your Piedmont Laureate. Since 2018, I’ve been a writing mentor in Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center’s Visible Ink program, where I’ve helped people (mainly patients) give voice to their stories through writing. As a board member of the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, I initiated the “Virtual VCCA” program in the spring of 2020 (very soon after the pandemic closed down the artists’ residency program) to provide a platform for writers, visual artists and composers–and to develop an online community. While serving as a board member of the Orange County Literacy Council, I co-chaired (with my pal, Jeff Polish, who runs The Monti program) several of our most successful community events, again connecting writers to the community and vice versa. During the pandemic I hosted virtual interviews with Orange County authors, as part of the Hillsborough Arts Council’s Writers’ Series. As a queer man, I’ve moderated events at Duke and UNC, usually on LGBTQ subjects, including a panel earlier last year on student activism.
Before I sign off for now, I want to express my appreciation to the sponsoring organizations–Raleigh Arts, United Arts Council, Durham Arts Council, and the Orange County Arts Commission. I’m very glad to be working with them. Also, I owe a debt of gratitude to my immediate predecessor, Dasan Ahanu, as well as to my inspiring friend and role model, Jaki Shelton Green, once upon a time ago a Piedmont Laureate and now Poet Laureate of North Carolina.
I think that’s enough for now. You can find me in Hillsborough, often walking my cocker spaniel, Binx. Or you can reach out to me via email at stevenpetrow@gmail.com. I hope to see you at one of the many Piedmont Laureate events in the coming months. Please don’t be shy. I even hope you’ll accord me a moment of grace for having attended the wrong color blue university in Durham.
–Steven Petrow
Piedmont Laureate 