Georgia has a proud heritage of producing literary luminaries. The legacies of authors like Margaret Mitchell, Flannery O’Connor and Joel Chandler Harris continue to live on.
Not so for Byron Herbert Reece, the once-celebrated poet of Appalachia, whom most people called “Hub.”
Reece was nominated for a Pulitzer, winner of two Guggenheim awards, lauded by AJC editor Ralph McGill as one of the “great poets of our time” and the subject of Georgia’s official historic drama, “The Reach of Song.”
But a recent conversation with an English professor at a Georgia university who was unfamiliar with the author was a painful reminder of Reece’s precarious place in history.
Click below to read about efforts to preserve Reece’s legacy and places you can visit in North Georgia where the poet’s spirit lives on.
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