Poet & Professor
…climbing bloody-knuckled
EGS, “Snakebelly Low”
from the copperhead pit
to the open mouth of God.
Emma Galloway Stephens is a poet, professor, and a peculiar pilgrim. Raised in the Appalachian foothills of north Greenville County, South Carolina, her poems pour from a native landscape of red clay and cicada summers. Her parents, both educators themselves, reared her on poetry, classic literature, ghost stories, the Bible, and Shakespeare, all of which inform the foundation of her work. Her poems play within the known and unknown, the spiritual and the tangible, and explore the beauty, terror, and mystery of what Flannery O’Connor called the “Christ-haunted” American south.
Emma has taught English and creative writing courses on a university level since 2017. She earned her MFA from Converse University in 2023. In addition to teaching and writing, she performs annually with the Greenville Shakespeare Company. She is a co-founder of Arbor Institute for the Arts in Greenville, SC, where she serves as the Director of Education. She shares her life with her husband and their small menagerie of cats and reptiles.