If you’re looking to start a book collection, but are having trouble finding the right niche to specialize in, I’ve got just the thing: trucker poetry. I stumbled across what appears to be the North Carolina Collection’s sole title in this genre, Rotha Dawkins’s Driving ‘N Dreaming (Your Treasure Publications, 2001). Dawkins is the author of the popular trucker romances Red High Heels and Red High Heels II.
I checked WorldCat to see if anything else would show up under the subject heading “Truckers — Poetry,” and sure enough, there were four more titles: Trucker’s Life, by Daren Flynn (Vantage Press, 1997); Driver: Sixteen Gears and Lonely, by Joe Walsh (Violin Roads Press, 1987); Soft Slow Motion by Dixie Schnell (Turnaround, 2001; and The Road Leads North: A Collection of Poems of the North Country Through an Alaskan Trucker’s Eyes, by Robert D. Birt (R.D. Birt, 1989). With all that time on the open road to contemplate and compose, it’s no wonder that some of these folks are starting to commit their thoughts to verse.
I googled “special collections trucker” to see if there is a collection somewhere of similar material, and sure enough, there is. Apparently Michigan State keeps an archive of comic art, and they have quite a few entries under the “Trucker” heading in their index. Here is the link: http://www.lib.msu.edu/comics/rri/trri/troubled.htm