Literary Arts

One of the most important and influential Indian films of all time, Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali captures life in a rural Bengali village through startling visual poetry and unforgettable characters. The story chronicles a period of upheaval for an impoverished family, told through the eyes of its children.

"One of the best films ever made."
~Christopher Nolan

"An immersive cinematic experience and a film of elemental power."
~The Criterion Collection

"In Ray's films, the line between poetry and cinema dissolved. His artistry and filmmaking took my breath away."
~Martin Scorsese

"Anything signed by Satyajit Ray must be cherished. His films have inspired all my other movies in different ways."
~Wes Anderson

A film screening of this 2025 award-winning documentary which "follows three students and their adult allies as they fight to reinstate 97 books suddenly pulled from their school libraries. As they evolve from local to national activists - meeting with bestselling authors, politicians, Constitutional experts, and more, the film reveals the dark forces behind the accelerating wave of book bans in the U.S." The film will be followed by discussion with a panel of Davidson students, moderated by Shireen Campbell and Sydney Adams.

Named one of the 10 best movies of the millennium by Time Magazine, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is martial arts movie unlike any other. Two master warriors are faced with finding who stole the treasured Green Destiny sword. Their hunt leads them to an unlikely young woman with superior fighting skills and a fraught romantic past. Set against 19th-century China's breathtaking landscapes, Crouching Tiger features thrilling martial arts choreography by Yuen Wo Ping (The Matrix) and a star-making turn by Michelle Yeoh (Everything Everywhere All At Once).

Nominated for 10 Oscars and winner of four, including Best Foreign Film. 

"The most exhilarating martial arts movie I've seen. It's not just about the fighting, but about the depth of the characters, the gravity-defying visual poetry, and an underlying sense of sweeping romantic melancholy."
~Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

“An action-packed, visually dazzling film that combines breathtaking scenery with gravity-defying stunt work and emotionally satisfying character development.”
~Mark Kermode, BBC 

"A martial arts film that transcends its genre to become a work of grand emotional power.”
~Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

Rebecca Hazelton Stafford is an award winning poet, writer, critic, and editor. Her latest book, Generic Husband, is available from LSU Press and her upcoming YA novel is available from Barnes & Noble. Her poems have been published in numerous literary journals and national magazines, such as Poetry, The New Yorker, The Nation, and Boston Review. Widely anthologized, her work can be found in the Pushcart Prize anthology and Best American Poetry. Her literary criticism has been published in Poetry, and her teaching articles have been featured on the Poetry Foundation’s Learning Lab. She is the co-editor, with poet Alan Michael Parker, of The Manifesto Project, a favorite of poetry classrooms.

Lauren Yero is a Cuban American writer living in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Her debut YA novel, Under This Forgetful Sky is out now with Atheneum/Simon & Schuster. It was a Poets & Writers Get the Word Out pick, and both Kirkus Reviews and Book Riot named it one of the Best Books of the Year. In addition to writing, she teaches at a small farm-and-arts school in the beautiful county she calls home. She shares a small homestead with her husband, two kids, two pups, ten chickens, five geese, two ducks, and a couple hundred thousand honeybees.

Joseph Terrell, Madeline Dierauf ('25), and Murphy Campbell will be in Concert and Conversation in this event co-sponsored by the Bacca Foundation Visiting Scholar and Artist Program, the D.G. and Harriet Wall Martin Institute for Public Good, the Department of Music, and the Department of English.

Joseph Terrell spent 10 years singing, writing songs, and playing guitar with celebrated Americana quartet Mipso. A High Point, North Carolina native, Terrell founded Mipso as a student at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2011. After 1300 concerts across the US, Europe, and Asia—including Japan's oldest bluegrass festival, a December tour through Sweden, and a rolling concert down 6th Avenue during Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade—Mipso started an indefinite hiatus from touring in 2025. Joseph's debut solo album "Good For Nothing Howl" features members of Hiss Golden Messenger, Bon Iver, and Bonny Light Horseman. His recent singles are stripped-down folk gems showcasing his prowess on the acoustic guitar and his much-admired lyrics, which Indy Week called "dark and mature ... awash in mystical sound and symbolism."

Madeline Dierauf is a folk musician from Brevard, North Carolina, and a graduate of Davidson College. A sought-after fiddler and singer songwriter, she is a founding member of Appalachian group The Wilder Flower and Baltimore-based Irish traditional trio The East Coasters. She has loved fiddling for 16 years now, learning through mentorship from Beanie O’Dell, Ellen Lee at the Mountain School of Strings, Josh Carter and Owen Grooms, Elizabeth Bahnson, and Grammy-winning violinist Nicky Sanders. In 2020, she released her debut EP, Walk On By, with producer Mike Ashworth, and in 2019, 2020, 2022, 2024, and 2026, she wrote for and fiddled on albums with The Wilder Flower, The East Coasters, Pretty Little Goat, Dave Desmelik, and Susto String Band.  She holds a Master’s degree in American Studies with a thesis on the British roots of Appalachian ballads, and she is currently pursuing a second Master’s in Musicology as a Rhodes Scholar at The University of Oxford.

Murphy Campbell is on a mission to preserve the sound of Yancey and Mitchell counties. It's also the sound of her family. On her 19th birthday last year she stumbled into a lost collection of ballads from the region that were written hundreds of years ago, some of them by her distant family members. She just recorded them for her first album, Revenant, produced by Riley Baugus, and she’s going on a European tour with them this winter.

Before he made Oscars history with Parasite, visionary Korean director Bong Joon Ho reinvented the monster movie with this masterpiece. The New York Times called The Host a “feverishly imaginative genre hybrid" and Quentin Tarrantino proclaimed it one of the best movies of his generation.  It’s equal parts terrifying horror, laugh-out-loud comedy, and heart-wrenching family drama.

"A flawless monster movie."
~Dana Stevens, Slate

"Twisting suddenly from horror to pathos to comedy to action and back again."
~Roger Ebert

“A unique mix of blockbuster entertainment and anti-government social commentary.”
~Deep Focus Review

Gory, funny, and thrilling."|
~Metacritic

Charif Shanahan is the author of two collections of poetry: Trace Evidence: poems, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry; and Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Northwestern University. 

Shanahan’s poems appear widely, in such journals as The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and PBS NewsHour. His work has been anthologized in American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time (Graywolf Press, 2018), Furious Flower’s Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (Northwestern, 2019), and African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (Library of America, 2020).

Shanahan is the recipient of the Whiting Award; a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship; a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry; a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant to Morocco; and residency fellowships from Cave Canem Foundation, Hawthornden Foundation in Griante, Italy, the MacDowell Colony, La Maison Baldwin in St Paul, France, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, among other awards and recognitions.

Join us for a momentous reading that will include poems from North Carolina's Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green and a group of North Carolina Youth Poet Laureates and other exceptional high school poets from around the state.