Doug Hoekstra is a Chicago-bred, Nashville-based creative whose stories, essays, and poems have appeared in numerous publications. He has toured the U.S. and Europe as a singer-songwriter, in support of eight albums on various labels. His story collection Ten Seconds In-Between is forthcoming in June 2021.
Sylvia Woods is a native of Eastern Kentucky who taught high school English in East Tennessee for 43 years. Her poems have appeared in Appalachian Review, Calliope, Centrifugal Eye, Tennessee English Journal, and elsewhere. What We Take With Us is her first full-length poetry collection.
Barbara E. Young is a Middle Tennessee native. She has known party lines, coonskin caps, hula hoops, transistor radios under the covers, 8-track, CD-ROM, Blogger, and Covid 19. She returned to writing poetry at age 60 and still has a lot to learn. Heirloom Language is her first full-length collection. Young will read from her work at Scarritt Bennett Center in Nashville on June 24.
Every Lash is Leigh Anne Couch’s second collection after Houses Fly Away (2007) and a chapbook, Green and Helpless (2008). Her poems are published widely in magazines including PANK, Gulf Coast, Subtropic, Smartish Pace, Nelle, and Cincinnati Review. Now a freelance editor, she was formerly at Duke University Press and The Sewanee Review. She lives in Sewanee with writer Kevin Wilson and their sons.
Kendra DeColo is the author of two previous poetry collections, My Dinner with Ron Jeremy (2016) and Thieves in the Afterlife (2014). She is a recipient of a 2019 Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and has taught creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and Vanderbilt University. She’ll discuss I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers from the World at a virtual event hosted by Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 23.
In I’ll Take You There: Exploring Nashville’s Social Justice Sites, editors Amie Thurber and Learotha Williams Jr. collect the contributions of more than 100 Nashvillians to tell stories “about place, power, and the historic and ongoing struggle toward a more just city for all.” I’ll Take You There will be published by Vanderbilt University Press in May 2021.
