June 20, 2014 Charles Wright, the newly appointed U.S Poet Laureate, has won the National Book Award, the PEN Translation Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Griffin Prize, the American Book Award in Poetry, The Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize. He was born in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, and grew up in Oak Ridge and Kingsport.
June 13, 2014 Melissa Cundieff-Pexa received her M.F.A. from Vanderbilt University in 2012 and lives now in Ithaca, New York, with her husband and two small children. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Mid-American, Gargoyle, Fairy Tale Review, and The Collagist, among others. She will begin Ph.D. studies in creative writing in fall 2014.
May 16, 2014 Bill Brown grew up in West Tennessee ten miles from the Mississippi River. He is the author of eight poetry collections and a creative-writing textbook. “The Way” was originally published in Tar River Poetry and will appear in Brown’s forthcoming collection, Elemental, which is due in September. Brown will give a free public reading on May 22, 2014, at 7 p.m. in the Fondren Building at the Scarritt-Bennett Center in Nashville.
May 9, 2014 Poet-photographer Lola White has published poems in a variety of literary magazines since 1977, and her photographs have been shown in a number of galleries. During the 1990s she conducted a poetry program for Nashville’s Talking Library, presenting such diverse writers as Philip Levine, Ann Patchett, Jeff Hardin, and Bill Brown. White has worked as a department-store wrapper, teacher, jewelry maker, folksinger, and bookseller. She lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee.
April 25, 2014 Corey Mesler’s work has been published in many journals and anthologies. In addition to a dozen chapbooks of both poetry and prose, he has also published eight novels, four full-length poetry collections, and three books of short stories. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize numerous times, and two of his poems were chosen for The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor. Mesler lives in Memphis, where he is the co-owner (with his wife, Cheryl Mesler) of Burke’s Book Store. He will read from and sign copies of his newest collection, The Catastrophe of My Personality, at Burke’s on May 1, 2014, at 5:30 p.m.
April 11, 2014 Sarah Arvio’s books include Visits from the Seventh; Sono: cantos; and night thoughts: 70 dream poems & notes from an analysis (all from Alfred A. Knopf). Arvio has won the Rome Prize of the American Academy of Arts & Letters, as well as Guggenheim, Bogliasco, and NEA fellowships. For many years a translator for the United Nations in New York and Switzerland, she now lives in Maryland near the Chesapeake Bay. Arvio will read from night thoughts at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on April 17, 2014, at 5:30 p.m.
