(aka Seabrook Wilkinson)

The poet and scholar Seabrook Wilkinson died in his bed in Old Town Key West on September 30 after a long illness characterized by circulatory problems.

Seabrook, as he was known to his literary contacts and all his friends in Key West, was born John Charles Valley in Pickens, South Carolina, on July 14, 1950. As a way to honor his relation to South Carolina history, beginning in 1971, he took on other names from his ancestral lineage, eventually settling on Charles Pinckney Seabrook Wilkinson, and then finally just Seabrook Wilkinson, as his preferred pen name.

His scholarly career was distinguished. He graduated from Harvard, Magna Cum Laude in Fine Arts, 1971, and from Oxford University with a Master of Arts, First Class, in Theology in 1973. From there he took a position in the English Department of Fettes College in Edinburgh, one of the finest public (that is, private) schools in Great Britain, and served for many years as head of the department. He had an outstanding reputation as an inspiring teacher and is credited with sending more of his students on to Oxford and Cambridge than any teacher at Fettes before him. He was also known as an excellent visual artist, with his personally designed and hand painted Christmas cards a valued series for family and friends. In 1992 he returned to South Carolina to do advanced graduate work in literature at the University of South Carolina. He taught briefly at the College of Charleston, but turned increasingly to writing, publishing reviews and essays for The Charleston Mercury and working on his first volume of poems.

Seabrook began visiting Key West in the mid 1990’s and moved there permanently in 2007, the year his first book of poems, A Local Habitation, was published in Charleston. He continued to refine his poetry, receiving a grant from the Florida Keys Council of the Arts to publish his second book, A Resident Alien: Key West Poems (2013). In the last months of his life he was working on a third volume of poems, expected to appear posthumously through Seastory Press.