“D” is for Durban, Pam Rosa [b. 1947]. Author. An Aiken native, Durban graduated from UNC-Greensboro. In the 1970s she a was a free-lance writer for Osceola, an alternative newspaper. She moved to Atlanta where she was a contributing editor for the Atlanta Gazette. In Atlanta she taped interviews with women in a textile mill community which she published as Cabbagetown Families. In 1979 she received her MFA from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. She then taught creative writing at several schools before being named Doris Betts Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2001. Throughout the 1980s she published short stories in periodicals and published a collection of them as All Set about with Fever, and Other Stories. In some of her short stories and certainly in her novel, The Laughing Place, Pam Rosa Durban’s South Carolina roots are quite evident.
Dr. Walter Edgar has two programs on South Carolina Public Radio: Walter Edgar's Journal, and South Carolina from A to Z. Dr. Edgar received his B.A. degree from Davidson College in 1965 and his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina in 1969. After two years in the army (including a tour of duty in Vietnam), he returned to USC as a post-doctoral fellow of the National Archives, assigned to the Papers of Henry Laurens.