Born in New York and raised in Nashville, Haviland Whiting is a 2019 United States Youth Poet Laureate Ambassador and the 2018 Nashville Youth Poet Laureate. She is a senior at Harpeth Hall School. And What Would You Say If You Could? is her first published collection of poetry.
Carolyn Welch is a writer and a pediatric nurse practitioner. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Gulf Coast, Poet Lore, Bellevue Literary Review, Sundog, Tar River Poetry, The Southeast Review, The Minnesota Review, and other literary journals. She lives in Norris, Tennessee.
Stellasue Lee is a co-host, with Linda Parsons, of WordStream, a weekly reading series in Knoxville. She was founding editor of Rattleand is now editor emerita. Dr. Lee received her Ph.D. from Honolulu University. Winner of the grand prize of Poetry to Aide Humanity by Al Falah in Malaysia, she now teaches privately.
Cara Dees is the author of Exorcism Lessons in the Heartland, winner of the 2018 Barrow Street Book Prize. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Best New Poets, Harvard Review, and Poetry Daily. A Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cincinnati, she holds an M.F.A. from Vanderbilt University. Dees will appear at the 2019 Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville on October 11-13.
Linda Parsons’ poetry has appeared in The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, and Shenandoah, among many other journals and anthologies. She is playwright-in-residence for The Hammer Ensemble, the social justice wing of Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville. Candescent is her fifth poetry collection.
Kory Wells recently served two terms as the Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, where she founded and manages the reading series Poetry in the Boro. Her work has appeared in James Dickey Review, Ruminate, The Southern Poetry Anthology: Tennessee, and other publications. Wells will discuss Sugar Fix at the 2019 Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville on October 11-13.
