September 17, 2014

 
Columbia native wins

MacArthur genius grant

Poet Terrance Hayes at his home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on September 8, 2014, shortly after being named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow for 2014. MACARTHUR FOUNDATION — John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur

BY JOEY HOLLEMAN

COLUMBIA, SC — People who know Columbia native Terrance Hayes long have recognized his genius with words. Now they, and he, have validation with Hayes being named Wednesday to the 2014 class of MacArthur Fellows, informally known as the genius grants.

“In a strange and perhaps understandable way this news is not surprising,” said Kwame Dawes, the former director of the S.C. Poetry Initiative at the University of South Carolina. “Terrance Hayes is one of a handful of poets in America today whose every new book is anticipated and given great attention.”

“I knew he was special from the very beginning,” said Hope Spillane, who taught Hayes English in ninth grade at Spring Valley High School. “He had an eagerness and an enthusiasm to learn.”

Hayes, 42, grew up in Columbia and earned an undergraduate degree from Coker College in Hartsville before heading to Pittsburgh for graduate school. These days, he’s a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

Because of the mysterious nature of the MacArthur Fellows selections – there isn’t an application process – Hayes had no idea he was under consideration. He ignored the first call from the Chicago-based foundation to inform him of his selection for the no-strings-attached $625,000 grant.

“I looked down at the phone – ‘Illinois? I don’t know anybody in Illinois.’ So I didn’t answer it,” Hayes said.

When they called back several days later, he took the call and couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “There was first sort of instant surprise, ‘What! What! What were they thinking,’” he said.

He has only begun to think about how he’ll use the money, but it will involve encouraging others to write.

He balks at the term “genius grant.” He, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which hands out the awards, prefer to call them “creativity grants.”

“I don’t think anybody wants to walk into a room where everybody thinks you’re a genius,” Hayes said. “That’s too much pressure.”

However, there’s little doubt about the word-crafting skill of this former college basketball player, who focused more on visual arts in his high school and college days.

At Spring Valley, Spillane earned a small grant to begin a creative writing publication called “Scribblings.” Hayes, then a senior, was among the students who submitted work to be considered for the first issue.

“His writing showed a kind of maturity and creativity that just didn’t show up in other submissions,” said Spillane, now retired.

The teacher has kept in touch with her student through the years. When she discovered that Hayes was the featured speaker at an event at her alma mater, Agnes Scott College in Georgia, she made a point of attending. The student became the teacher, and the former teacher was thrilled.

“I’m in the audience, and he’s talking about his writing process and I’m thinking, ‘He’s so beyond me,’ ” Spillane said.

Charlene Spearen, chairwoman of the division of humanities at Allen University, said Hayes is the perfect writer for curricula at the historically black college in Columbia. He’s African-American, he grew up in Columbia and “he’s a phenomenal poet and a phenomenal person.”

“He’s a home-grown person who always loved coming home,” Spearen said. “Students connect with his work.”

Hayes was the first poet brought in by the S.C. Poetry Initiative in 2004 to read his work. Dawes, who founded the initiative before moving on to the University of Nebraska, described the 6-foot-6 Hayes as an impressive presence on the stage.

“His manner of leaning into the microphone, using his large hands to weave images in the air, and his quick, self-deprecating wit during the banter before each poem, amount to the affectations of his performance,” Dawes wrote in 2004.

Told on Wednesday about Hayes becoming a MacArthur Fellow, Dawes was excited for his friend.

“He is a brilliant, innovative and powerful poet who combines sensitivity and vulnerability with a strong sense of form and experimentation,” Dawes said. “He has been an ardent student of American poetry and writes as if in constant dialogue with poets of the past and the present.

“What fantastic news for South Carolina and Columbia and Spring Valley High. Terrance Hayes is a generous and thoughtful human being, and he deserves to be racking up these awards as he has been doing. I am so, so proud of him.”

Nobody, however, was prouder Wednesday than Ethel and James Hayes, Terrance’s parents. He had been sworn to secrecy, but he told his parents a big award was coming his way. He has won the National Book Award in 2010 for his collection “Lighthead” and a slew of other awards through the years. His parents have grown to expect honors coming his way, but this was different.

“It was a shock to us,” Ethel Hayes said from Florida, where she and James are spending time with their other son, James II, and his family. They were in bed when they got the text message from their son after the official announcement early Wednesday.

Ethel said Terrance showed his artistic skill early by drawing. He also was always writing, but he kept that work mostly to himself. “I never knew what he was writing about,” she said.

James served in the military, and both parents have worked as prison guards. Discipline was important in their home. While the parents didn’t stress art or writing, they encouraged their children to excel at whatever they did. James II works in intelligence with the government.

“We always expected great things from them, and they always produced,” James said of his sons.

Nobody at Spring Valley acted like there was anything unusual about a jock who spent his spare time working on sketches. “So many people had so many interests,” Terrance recalled.

Terrance, who earned his graduate degree in poetry from Pitt in 1997, said he didn’t really learn the art of writing until he moved north. “In South Carolina, I was primarily a jock and a painter,” he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “Pittsburgh was the first chance to be in a classroom with other writers, to have conversations with other writers.”

But his upbringing in the South affects everything he writes.

“It’s my leg up,” he said. “It’s always a plus to be a Southerner in the North.”

Southerners always are the best storytellers, he likes to tell his wife, Yona Harvey, a poet herself whose heritage is in Ohio.

He has written poems from the vantage point of historical figures, including the late U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond. His “The Blue Seuss” uses Seussian rhymes to tell the African American experience from the Middle Passage to contemporary urban decay.

“I’ve always made it a mission to see who I am and where I came from,” he said.

He plans to come home in December for his mother’s 60th birthday. He, his brother and his father have pledged to take on all the responsibilities for making it a big bash. It’s supposed to be all about Ethel, but it’ll be Terrance’s first time around many family members since the MacArthur Fellows announcement.

“Now we’ve got one more thing to celebrate,” Terrance said.

__________________________

Terrance Hayes

Reads at Cave Canem 2012