Poems

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.

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.