Bess Cooley is a winner of The Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, and her work has also appeared in Prairie Schooner, Western Humanities Review, and Verse Daily, among other publications. She is the co-founding editor of Peatsmoke Journal and teaches at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Annette Sisson is the author of Small Fish in High Branches (2022). Her poems have been published in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Cider Press Review, Aeolian Harp Anthology, and elsewhere. She is a professor of English at Belmont University in Nashville. Sisson will appear at the 2024 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, October 26-27.
Ciona Rouse is a poet, editor, and educator based in Nashville. The author of the chapbook Vantablack (Third Man Books, 2017), her poetry also appears in Oxford American, Poem-a-Day, NPR Music, The Slowdown, Booth, and other publications. Ciona Rouse will host a “A Celebration of Tennessee Poets for National Poetry Month,” part of the TN Writers | TN Stories series, at the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville on April 13.
James E. Cherry is a native of Jackson, Tennessee. His books include the short fiction collection Still a Man and Other Stories and the novels Shadow of Light and Edge of the Wind. He is president of the Griot Collective of West Tennessee. A book launch event for his fourth poetry collection, Between Chance and Mercy, will be held at Turntable Coffee Counter in Jackson on April 13.
Gatherer, forthcoming from Belle Point Press, is the debut collection by Todd Osborne, a poet and teacher from Nashville. Osborne’s poems have been featured in The Missouri Review, Tar River Poetry, and EcoTheo Review.
In Dynamite Nashville, Betsy Phillips delves into a series of unsolved bombings in the city between 1957 and 1960 and uncovers links to racist violence that spread across the South in the years that followed. Dynamite Nashville will be published by Third Man Books in July 2024.
