Lorman resident Hystercine Rankin has been named a 1997 National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellow. National Heritage Fellowships are the NEA's most prestigious honor in folk and traditional arts. Rankin, a master quilter and teacher at Mississippi Cultural Crossroads in Port Gibson, was honored for her achievement along with 10 other master artisans and musicians at a White House ceremony on September 23, 1997.

Rankin learned her quilting technique and patterns at age 12 from her grandmother and other women in her community. When she married in her late teens, she and her husband, Ezekiel, raised seven of her siblings left by the death of her mother from cancer; when they grew up and left home she raised seven more of her own children. As each child left home she gave them one of her handmade quilts to take with them. At first she quilted only for the utilitarian purpose of keeping her family warm, but when she was invited in 1981 to be a resident artist in her local junior high school she began to consider the artistic dimension of her work. Her creatively patterned quilts include her memory quilts that portray her childhood memories of cotton picking, plowing with a mule, going to church in a horse-drawn wagon, and grieving over the murder of her father by a white man who was never convicted.

For the past 15 years, Rankin has been teaching quilting to others. She has exhibited and demonstrated her quilting throughout the South, including a 1992 exhibit at Mississippi Cultural Crossroads entitled Visions and Dreams: A One Woman Show. In 1996 she and her quilts were featured at the Smithsonian's Festival of American Folklife.