Poet Juanita Tobin Dies Blowing Rocket Columnist Wrote Regularly Into Her Nineties High Country poet and personality Juanita Rose Brown Tobin died this past Monday. Services will be held in Boone on February 11th. Photo courtesy of The Blowing Rocket By Jeff Eason The High Country lost one of its literary lighthouses this week when Juanita Rose Brown Tobin died Monday afternoon at the Davant Extended Care Center in Blowing Rock. She was 91. Tobin was a registered nurse but was best known in the High Country as a published poet and writer of a regular column in The Blowing Rocket. She was also an active member of the High Country Writers Association and the Boone Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. Ms. Tobin was also the namesake for the JuanitaJuanita Coffeehouse and Assemblee, a monthly showcase of local musicians, poets and storytellers in the High Country. “Juanita’s work chronicles the voice and history of this region of Appalachia,” said coffeehouse organizer Earl LeClaire in June 2006 when the Assemblee first opened. “Her work also deals with the human condition in this, our 21st century.” Among Tobin’s published books of poetry are the titles Under the Crooked Pine and The Ransom Street Poems. Tobin’s final poem was written in haiku form and reads: nothing happens almost nothing a leaf falls Surviving are one son, Paul Tobin and wife Judy of West Jefferson, three grandchildren; Chris Tobin of Mebane, NC, Mark Tobin of Philadelphia, PA, and Suzanne Tobin of Greensboro; two step-grandchildren; Matt Silverberg of Boone, and Jill Tohber of Santa Monica, CA, and two brothers of Trenton, FL and Frank Brown of Auburn, AL, and one sister-in-law, Monnye Brown of Trenton, FL. Services for Juanita Tobin will be conducted on Sunday, February 11th at 11 a.m., at the Boone Unitarian Universalist Fellowship.