A lifelong resident of the Carolina Low Country, William P. Baldwin is an award-winning novelist, poet, biographer and historian. He graduated from Clemson with a BA in History and an MA in English. He ran a shrimp boat for nine years then built houses, but the principle occupation of his life has been writing. His works include the popular oral histories Mrs. Whaley and Her Charleston Garden and, with Genevieve “Sister” Peterkin, Heaven is a Beautiful Place. The screen play for the latter earned him a Silver Remy at the Houston Film Festival. Journey of a Hope Merchant, the life of around the world solo sailor Neal Petersen, won the National Outdoor Writing Award. For its depiction of Southern race relations his first novel The Hard to Catch won the Lillian Smith Award He wrote three more. Charleston Magazine called Baldwin’s latest, Charles Town, “a robust, self-confident conglomeration of sophistication, bawdiness, and bravado…a tour de force.” With photographer V. Elizabeth Turk he did Mantelpieces of the Old South and supplied the text for chef Charlotte Jenkin’s Gullah Cuisine. He collaborated with architectural photographer N. Jane Iseley on Charleston, Charleston Impressions, Daytrips from Charleston, Plantations of the Low Country, and Low Country Plantations Today. Done with photographer Selden Hill and published in 2011, The Unpainted South won the Gold Benjamin Franklin Award for poetry given by the Independent Book Sellers Association. The follow up collection These Our Offerings earned a second Benjamin Franklin Award. Both were published with Evening Post Books. In 2018 Class Publishing brought out Carolina Rambling: a Visual and Poetical Tour. A fine match to the earlier two, this collection features Selden Hill’s color photography. Southern Prayers with photographs and drawings by Tony Griffin is the most recent to use his poetry. Baldwin’s writing has also appeared in Charleston, Garden and Gun, Southern Living, Victoria, Veranda, Southern Accents, Grace, Humans and Nature magazines, the Atlanta Constitution, and on the electronic poetry site: Poem du jour.