Sunday Reader:Governor's School East meets at Meredith College in Raleigh for six weeks each summer.

Sunday Reader:Here at Read, we like to see the expansion of arts in all venues. The Raleigh Quarterly is such a venture, providing an outlet for local visual and literary artists.

Sunday Reader:'Giant" is the poem that almost never was. It came along during my first year of serious poetry writing, and my early drafts of the poem were written in free verse.

Sunday Reader:Now, when I see teenage girls laughing. When I see them loosed on a summer evening -- their limbs tanned and gossamer, their imagined freedom radiating like nuclear light -- I can't help but fast-forward two decades or more. I know the curve of their bones has already made an imperceptible bow to gravity. I see the decay in slow motion, even or especially through those stunning and immortal years.

Sunday Reader:My husband Don and I celebrated our 50th anniversary last summer. This poem came along soon after as I was thinking of moons he and I had gazed at, kissed under, wept under, marveled under, yelled at each other under.

Sunday Reader:The last time I visited my grandparents, they were in their 90s and neither was well. One night, as I was setting their table for dinner, I found an unexpected treasure. For the remainder of my visit, my mind kept wandering back to it. The bittersweet discovery reminded me of the fragility of the future while letting me step for a moment into a comforting past.

Sunday Reader:Had both her mother and her sister Kitty not insisted upon it, Miss Mary Bennet, whose interest in Nature did not extend to the Nature of Society, would not have attended the ball in Grosvenor Square.

Sunday Reader:Lots of poets have written about their experiences with mental illness, but few have written about the effect a breakdown has on other family members. The anthology "Living in Storms" considers manic-depression from all facets: those who suffer, the children of those afflicted, and those who keep the family together when a loved one experiences mental illness.

Sunday Reader:Recently I found out that an old friend passed away. We were close friends all through college, but eventually lost touch because I moved away. The news of his death arrived a year after the fact. This is one of many poems I wrote to deal with my own grief.

Sunday Reader:The Civil Rights Movement did not involve just adults. In Birmingham, Ala. in May 1963, scores of children took part in a protest that became known as The Children's March.

Sunday Reader:One of the loveliest and most intriguing fragments from ancient Greek poetry is Sappho's broken simile.

Sunday Reader:My daughter woke me one morning in tears. Her best friend had gone drinking and crashed her car into a tree. She hit at 90 miles an hour. Nothing but a leg was left to identify. Her boyfriend was ruined beyond repair. Shortly afterward I went to the Blue Ridge Mountains for a week's solitary work. When I sat down in front of my computer, I found that I could only mourn. By the time I left, I had the first draft of "Night Huntress," a narrative prose poetry collection dealing with grief, loss and resolution.