The deadline for entries to participate in the 2012-2013 Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poets Series has been extended to Oct. 31 for the Central Region.

Created by the North Carolina Poetry Society, the program provides promising student poets at all levels the opportunity to work with a distinguished published poet.

Participants are selected in four categories: middle school, high school, college/university and adult level.

Students in the Central Region will have the opportunity to work with Distinguished Poet Ann Deagon. Students will send their poetry to her for comments and meet with her to discuss the work. The student poets will then read selected poems at one local venue in addition to the Central Region Reading hosted by St. Andrews University in Laurinburg, NC.

The Central Region includes 32 counties including Scotland, Alamance, Cumberland, Durham, Lee, Mecklenburg, Montgomery, Moore, Richmond, Robeson and Union.

To enter the Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poets Series, each student must submit an application form available at http://www.sleepycreek.org/poetry/dpsappstudent.htm, a personal statement, representative poetry, and an instructor’s recommendation. All information is available online at www.ncpoetrysociety.org.

Material can be submitted electronically to Dr. Ted Wojtasik at wojtasik@sapc.edu or mailed to Dr. Ted Wojtasik, Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poets Series, St. Andrews University, 1700 Dogwood Mile, Laurinburg, NC 28352.

The Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poets Series originated in 2003 upon the advice of then North Carolina Poet Laureate Fred Chappell. It is named after Chappell and former NCPS president Marie Gilbert.

Deagon is in her second year as the Central Region Distinguished Poet. She began her serious writing in 1970 and published Carbon 14 and Poetics South in 1974. In successive years she published Indian Summer, Women and Children First, and There is No Balm in Birmingham.

Deagon edited The Guilford Review from 1976 until 1984 and worked to broaden the scope of the Poetry Center of the Southeast through her National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) Literary Fellowship in 1982. That work laid the foundation for the North Carolina Writers’ Network, for which Deagon still does critiques. She has served as president of several literary organizations and did residencies at Bread Loaf, Yaddo, Atlantic Center for the Arts and Weymouth.

She graduated magna cum laude from Birmingham-Southern. She received an M.A. in Greek and her Ph.D. in Latin from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She taught at Furman University and retired as the Hege Professor of Humanities at Guilford College in 1992. She has taught overseas in Naples, Athens and London as well as served as visiting professor at Elon College and Kalamazoo College.