Elizabeth Cox’s poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Southern Poetry Review, The Atlantic, and others. Her fiction has won the O’Henry Prize, the Robert Penn Warren Award, and the Lillian Smith Award. Cox grew up in Chattanooga and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
Cynthia Robinson Young’s work has appeared in Sojourners, Poetry South, The Ekphrastic Review, and Catalpa: a magazine of Southern perspectives, among other journals and anthologies. She is a graduate student at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
Former Murfreesboro resident Allison Boyd Justus has worked for Tennessee’s community colleges and public schools as a library assistant, a teacher of English-language learners, and a teacher of intellectually gifted students.
Ashley Roach-Freiman is a librarian and poet from Memphis. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Bone Bouquet, Fugue, THRUSH Poetry Journal, Southern Women’s Review, The Literary Review, Ghost Proposal, and Nightjar Review.
Doug Hoekstra, an author and musician, has toured the U.S. and Europe as a singer-songwriter in support of eight albums on various labels. He will read from Unopened, his first poetry collection, on May 7 at The Post East in Nashville.
Gaylord Brewer is a professor at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro. His most recent books are a cookbook-memoir, The Poet’s Guide to Food, Drink, & Desire, and a new collection, The Feral Condition, from which this poem is excerpted.
