Overview
Spencer George is a writer, folklorist, and PhD student in English at Duke University. Her research focuses on representations of rural culture in 20th and 21st Century American Literature, with a particular focus on Appalachia and the regional American South. She is the creator and host of newsletter and podcast GOOD FOLK, and has previously supported the production of new stories through work with Girls Write Now, ArtistYear, and the StoryCorps Mobile Tour. Her work has been published in The Bitter Southerner, Longreads,The Adroit Journal, and The New Orleans Literary Festival’s Saints and Sinners Anthology. Spencer was the 2019 recipient of the Peter S. Prescott Prize for Prose Writing, a 2023-2024 Maynard Adams Fellow in the Public Humanities, and a 2024 Duke Climate Communications Fellow.
Spencer holds a B.A. in English and Human Rights with a concentration in Creative Writing from Barnard College and an M.A. in Folklore from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is broadly interested in the intersections between land, labor, and folk identity, and how they shape contemporary understandings of the rural South.