Major Jackson is the author of five volumes of poetry, including Roll Deep and Leaving Saturn, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. In January 2021, he will join the Vanderbilt University faculty as Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English.
William Woolfitt is the author of three poetry collections, including Beauty Strip and Charles of the Desert. His poems, short stories, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, Blackbird, Image, Tin House, The Threepenny Review, and other journals. He’s an associate professor of English at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee.
Jesse Graves is the author of four poetry collections, including Basin Ghosts and Specter Mountain, a collaboration with William Wright. His work received the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He teaches at East Tennessee State University, where he is poet-in-residence and professor of English.
Destiny O. Birdsong is a Louisiana-born poet, fiction writer, and essayist. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and the MacDowell Colony and won the Academy of American Poets Prize. She earned her M.F.A. and Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University and lives in Nashville. Birdsong will appear at a virtual event hosted by Parnassus Books in Nashville on October 14.
Charlotte Pence’s first book of poems, Many Small Fires (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), received an INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award from Foreword Reviews. Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have recently been published in Harvard Review, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, and Brevity. A graduate of Emerson College (M.F.A.) and the University of Tennessee (Ph.D.), she is now the director of the Stokes Center for Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama.
Voyage of the Adventure, a collection of photographs by John Guider documenting his 2016 journey retracing the historic route of the Donelson party, will be published in September 2020. John Guider is an Emmy Award–winning photographer and author based in Nashville.
