2025 Posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award for Carey Scott Wilkerson
A Tribute by Dr. Beth Gylys
I met Carey Scott Wilkerson—though we all called him Scott, he made sure to publish under his full name as a tribute to his late father—in 2016. He was enrolled in my Contemporary American Poetry that year, a class chock-full of brilliant writers and thinkers: Josh Martin and Greg Emilio were among those enrolled in that cohort. Cohort was a word Scott often used to describe his fellow students. When he made a comment in class, he would refer to them as his “esteemed colleagues” and his “esteemed cohort”. He was both dead serious in his high regard and also a little goofily proper.
It was almost impossible not to love Scott. He had an exuberant generosity that infected everyone around him. He had a way of making those in his presence feel included and valued. I think probably that inclusivity of spirit was Scott’s greatest gift. But he had many gifts. He was utterly brilliant, and he also moved through the world with an overabundant humility—always deferential and self-deprecating. I didn’t know how smart he was until I read his first paper that semester. I remember wondering as I read it, who is this man? He was so eloquent, used French and Italian phrases with abandon—in such a way that one understood these were part of his day-to-day vernacular. He had an extensive vocabulary and made references to so many other writers, I was forever looking things up when I read a Scott paper. He seemed to have an interest in the most esoteric subjects: boxing, mathematics, Icarus—he was obsessed with Icarus, that fall from the sky became a bit like a guiding force for his artistic life. Perhaps he understood far too well how easy it is to plummet into the depths, how inevitable failure and loss will be, yet how important it is to try to reach the stars.
I learn so much from the students I teach, and Scott taught me every day how to be a better person and teacher. He encouraged me when it was not his responsibility to do so, and he modeled a positivity that I hope (but I know I sometimes fail) to embrace.
Scott took three or four classes of mine while he was pursuing the degree. To take a class, he had to drive two and a half hours one way. He was making very little money, and I know those drives back and forth were exhausting and stressful. When he started the program, he had an old car that he was nursing along, and we were all relieved when he replaced it. One of those classes that he took from me was a summer workshop that I will never forget. I had not taught a generative workshop before, but I had been participating in one for several months, writing a poem a day. Why I thought that was a manageable ask when so many of the students enrolled had families and long drives and other classes and/or careers, I do not know. But ask I did, and those students delivered. Day after day they wrote and produced draft after stunning draft, many of those drafts appearing in journals and books they would later publish. “Los Feliz” is a poem Scott drafted that summer. It marked a change for him from these more allusive, mythical, referential poems to a more intimate—not quite confessional exactly, but certainly more personal poetic posture. “Los Feliz” focuses on a love relationship that had a kind of magical quality even though its days were numbered. I was proud of Scott for stepping into vulnerability in his poem. And I am more than grateful to have had the chance to work with him and watch him (like Icarus) soar as he graduated and was hired full-time and eventually tenured. I only wish he had been with us longer.
“Los Feliz,” from Cruel Fever of the Sky
Because there are no fireflies in Los Angeles
we strung faerie lights through pepper trees
that summer beside the cedar-wood bungalow
in our narrow canyon. The Rossini 78s we found
at some Saturday-morning bazaar threaded
von Stade’s Cenerentola through the drone of traffic
tangled in palms on Franklin Avenue, just below.
Sheila, the neighbor, claimed the power of crystals
could save us from conspiracies, government smog,
and urban dreams with disappointing endings.
Her boyfriend, Bernard, a contract pilot for the police
promised to bless our love from the helicopter’s cockpit
during a pre-dawn flyover at four-thousand feet.
You cooked up a pan of eggplant parm for the actresses
living in the Sixth Street loft when they all agreed
both to be in my play and not take their clothes off onstage.
In the farmer’s market dumpster, I found new brushes
tied with yarn to unopened jars of shimmering gesso.
And I stretched canvas for the triptych you were painting
every night downstairs while I only pretended to sleep
but instead lay wondering what secret name for
fate I could invoke to keep you from leaving. I wish
I’d asked—even just once—if you knew the stars
in Andromeda are visible from the top
of the Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica Pier.
Carey Scott Wilkerson was the author of numerous plays, including Seven Dreams of Falling, Ariadne in Exile, The Revised Diagnosis of the Minotaur’s Head, and The Secret History of an Unseen Thing. Additionally, he was the author of four opera libretti: The Ariadne Songs and The Rescue (with composer Angela Schwickert); Eddie’s Stone Song: Odyssey of the First Pasaquoyan (with composer James Ogburn); and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (with composer Robert Chumbley). Wilkerson was the editor (with poet Melissa Dickson) of Stone, River, Sky: An Anthology of Georgia Poems and author of the poetry collection Threading Stone. His works for the stage have been produced in Los Angeles at the Lillian Theatre, The Eclectic Company Theater, and the Ivar Performance Research Group; in Oregon at the Collaborative Theatre Project; in New York at SUNY’s Staller Center for the Arts; in Illinois at the Millikin University Opera Theatre; in Atlanta at the Center for Contemporary Art; in Columbus, GA at the River Center for the Performing Arts, in Buena Vista at Pasaquan, and in Germany at the Saulheim Sangerhalle, the Wiesbaden Konzertplatz, and at the Junge Opera Rhein-Main Konservatorium, Frankfurt. He was a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, a recipient of the Columbus State University Creative Endeavors Prize, recipient of two Lillian E. Smith Writing Fellowships, and a Core Faculty member of Reinhardt University’s Low-Residency MFA Creative Writing Program. He earned a Ph.D. from Georgia State University and was Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Columbus State University.
Award-winning author, Distinguished Professor at Georgia State University, and the co-founder/Principal Investigator of Beyond Bars: A Journal of Literature and Art, a literary journal for incarcerated writers and artists, Beth Gylys is the author of five books of poetry and three chapbooks. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in the Birmingham Poetry Review, West Branch, The James Dickey Review, SWWIM and on the Best American Poetry blog.
