Writer, editor, publisher, donor, patron, organizer and arts advocate, Cynthia Boiter has had a remarkable and continuing impact on the arts community in South Carolina.

A widely published writer, Boiter is a six-time author for the South Carolina Fiction Project, a three-time winner of the Piccolo Fiction Open, and a recipient of fellowships in fiction and creative nonfiction from the South Carolina Academy of Authors, among other honors. Her work has appeared nationally and internationally in publications such as Woman’s Day, Family Circle, Southern Living, Sandlapper and elsewhere.

As a donor and arts advocate, she has served on the boards of multiple Midlands-area arts organization and serves on the Midlands-area advisory board for the Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities.

It is as editor and publisher that Boiter has had a remarkable impact in the Midlands community and the broader cultural landscape of the state. She and her husband founded Muddy Ford Press as a publication platform for South Carolina writers and artists. To date MFP has published fiction, poetry, nonfiction and books of visual art by South Carolina artists. The press also underwrites the publication of Jasper: The Word on Columbia Arts, a bimonthly arts magazine that premiered in September 2011 and regularly celebrates and spotlights local artists and their valuable presence in the community. She has been insistent on connecting artists across disciplines. She has organized forums, workshops, salons and other forms of community that connect artists and the public She promotes an interdisciplinary and collaborative aesthetic which she believes is essential to cultural growth, and she uses her position and the tools at her disposal to promote the Midlands and the state as centers of creativity and culture.

You can read the press release from the South Carolina Arts Commission here.