Award-winning author Stephanie Powell Watts visited Chowan University as the 31st recipient of the Mary Frances Hobson Prize for Distinguished Achievement in Arts and Letters. During her engaging talk, Stephanie — professor and Robert D. Rodale Chair in Writing at Lehigh University — shared insights into her work, influences, and the enduring power of storytelling.

Her acclaimed books, No One Is Coming to Save Us and We Are Taking Only What We Need, explore the lives of African Americans in the post-integration South. “My work is about the quiet collision of everyday life,” she shared. “My stories are often about the strangeness of home.”

Stephanie reflected on the influence of The Great Gatsby, describing it as “the person on the outside trying to get into the person on the inside” and noting “the desperate lengths we go to trying not to be the outsider.” She remarked that “all Western literature is a story of migration and an attempt to get back to home,” and her own writing strives to showcase women like herself, her mother, and her grandmother — especially those “who stayed in the South but wanted to escape the confines of their history and sometimes their own thinking.”

Emphasizing the connective power of stories, she told the audience, “Reading and writing are hopeful acts. We do both to explain the world to us — to explain ourselves to ourselves. We need stories to recommit ourselves to a time and a place and reinforce our shared humanity.”

Stephanie also touched on the role of religion in her life and work. Once a Jehovah’s Witness, she now leans toward Quaker beliefs but appreciates the symbolic richness of her religious upbringing: “Religion is the motherload for a world of symbol and metaphor… Not everything can fit in the world of logic.”

On the topic of writing, she acknowledged the presence of fear. “Fear is palpable. It gets under your skin and keeps you from doing what you want to do,” she said. “Tell fear that you are glad that it’s here to tell you what you need. Acknowledge it but dismiss it.”

When asked about AI, she was clear and confident: “AI has a place. It’s a tool and should be used as a tool. What creative people do cannot be supplanted by AI. Nobody thinks like you, nobody has your brain… AI will not have the print of a human heart.”

Stephanie closed with a powerful reminder: “We are all on the planet at the same time. It is fascinating and illuminating to fill in the gaps with what we know about each other.”