September 26, 2014 Amy Billone is a poet and a scholar who has published widely in both creative and academic journals. Her poetry collection, The Light Changes, was named a best book of the year in 2013 by Kirkus Reviews and won the 2014 IndieReader Discovery Award in Poetry. Billone, an Associate Professor of English at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, will give a free public reading at the University of Tennessee’s Hodges Library on September 29, 2014, at 7 p.m.
August 22, 2014 Jeff Hardin is the author of two collections of poetry: Fall Sanctuary, recipient of the Nicholas Roerich Prize, and Notes for a Praise Book. His third collection, Restoring the Narrative, received the Donald Justice Poetry Prize and will be published in 2015. He is professor of English at Columbia State Community College in Columbia, Tennessee. Hardin will give a free public reading at the Scarritt-Bennett Center in Nashville on August 28, 2014, at 6 p.m.
July 25, 2014 Kendra DeColo’s Thieves in the Afterlife was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2013 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Southern Indiana Review, Calyx, Best Indie Lit of New England, and elsewhere, and she has taught writing workshops in prisons, middle schools, and homeless shelters. Kendra DeColo will appear at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville October 10-12, 2014. All festival events are free and open to the public.
July 15, 2014 Jesse Graves is an assistant professor of English at Johnson City’s East Tennessee State University. His first poetry collection, Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine, won the 2011 Weatherford Award in Poetry from Berea College and the Appalachian Studies Association. He is also co-editor of The Southern Poetry Anthology: Tennessee and author of a new collection, Basin Ghosts. Graves will read from Basin Ghosts at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on July 26, 2014, at 2 p.m., and at the Southern Festival of Books, which will be held in Nashville October 10-12, 2014.
July 11, 2014 Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum is the author of Ghost Gear, a finalist for the Miller Williams Prize in poetry from the University of Arkansas Press. He is also the editor of Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose From the End of Days, the Floodgate Poetry Series, and PoemoftheWeek.org. A Nashville native, he teaches writing in Denver, Colorado. McFadyen-Ketchum will discuss Ghost Gear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on July 19, 2014, at 6:30 p.m.
June 27, 2013 Don Johnson is poet in residence at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, where he has been on the faculty for more than thirty years. He has written four volumes of poetry and is the editor of Hummers, Knucklers, and Slow Curves, a collection of contemporary baseball poems. He has also published numerous articles on Appalachian literature. Twice winner of the Ruth Berrien Fox Award from the New England Poetry Club, he is also the recipient of a Tennessee Arts Commission Individual Artist Award.
