2025 TALK Greenville 25 Most Beautiful People honoree Glenis Redmond
TALK Greenville 25 Most Beautiful 2025 honoree Glenis Redmond
Glenis Redmond is nothing short of the voice of Greenville. As the city’s first poet laureate, she serves as celebrant, comforter and encourager. She offers resonant calls to action and offers words for communal connection in every season. Poetry is her life’s work.
“I have been fortunate to travel nationally and internationally, bringing poetry to the masses for over 30 years – as a teaching artist and literary citizen. Poetry saved my life, so I try to return the favor. I am excited about some new collaborations with organizations both locally and nationally,” she says. “Since being diagnosed with Stage 3 Multiple Myeloma in 2019, I’ve also embraced medical advocacy as part of my life’s work. African Americans are twice as likely to be diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma. Outreach has always been integral to what I do in the world.”
The diagnosis led to Redmond’s motto: Bloom anyhow.
“I developed this motto while battling cancer. It reminds me – and others – to find reasons to rise each morning. Not just to push through the toil and struggle, but to seek the sun. To find pockets of joy. To unfurl. To flourish. To Bloom Anyhow,” she says.
Drawn to beauty, Redmond says nature is a healer. She and her grandson visited all of South Carolina’s state parks, which inspired her books, “The Song of Everything” and “Over Yonder: A Poet’s Exploration of South Carolina State Parks.” She says she needed that healing after the scariest thing she has ever faced, a stem cell transplant.
“To save my life, my doctor took me to the brink of death – administering high-dose chemotherapy, then infusing my stem cells back into my body,” she says. “It was the toughest, scariest 21 days of my life. I drifted in and out of consciousness… I hope I never have to make that trek again, but my oncologist reminds me that its recurrence is not if, but when. So I live every day with that cloud of impending doom overhead, doing my best to work through the fear I carry daily.”
And so, she creates.
“I want to keep writing and publishing more books,” she says. “Right now, I’m working on a young adult novel in verse titled ‘My Life Sounds Like a Poem,’ about Clayton ‘Peg Leg’ Bates, the one-legged tap dancer. I’m also documenting and writing poems about Fountain Inn Colored High School, the Rosenwald School my parents attended.”
Beyond writing, Redmond says she wants “to see my grandchildren grow into happy, healthy, thriving adults. And I want to keep giving back to my community – as long as I have breath in my lungs.”
Poet Teaching Artist
