Writing on Napkins at the Sunshine Club includes a poet laureate of Georgia and of the United States—and the poet who read at President Clinton’s second inauguration. The oldest poet was born in 1905 and the youngest in 1972. The Pulitzer-winning Stanley Kunitz wrote a famous poem about the Ocmulgee Indian Mounds. Miller Williams, father of the Grammy winning Lucinda Williams, lived in Macon in the early 1960s and became friends with Flannery O’Connor. In the late 1970s, soon after his Mercer days, David Bottoms wrote the poems for Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump and won the Walt Whitman Award. Jud Mitcham won the Devins Award for his first book, Somewhere in Ecclesiastes, and Seaborn Jones worked with Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and would later connect, in San Francisco, to one of the last pure lines of surrealism in American expression. These poets were either born in Macon or arrived in Macon at various points in their lives. Between Mercer University and Macon State College, poetry in Macon thrived. Adrienne Bond wrote her seminal poems and organized the Georgia Poetry Circuit. Judith Ortiz Cofer passed through Macon State at the brink of a new position at the University of Georgia and as she was establishing herself in American letters as an important spokesperson for women’s experience. From Bruce Beasley and his hybrid poetics to Stephen Bluestone and his craft in the lyric poem, this book presents a selection of poetry by Anya Silver, Amanda Pecor, Marjorie Becker, and the late African-American poet Reginald Shepherd, who was as well-known at his early death as any poet of his generation. Many of these poets studied with and knew the important poets of their time. Their own poems speak for themselves.