A Way to Break Out of Jail
April 15, 2011 In an interview in the Southern Literary Review, Vanderbilt poet Kate Daniels explains her seemingly unlikely kinship with another great poet associated with the Vanderbilt English Department:
News & Notes
On the Dais
April 14, 2011 The Fellowship of Southern Writers convenes today in Chattanooga for the sixteenth biennial Conference on Southern Literature. For three days, more than fifty members of the Fellowship will gather before a packed audience to read from their work and talk on panels about topics as diverse as writers’ efforts to preserve the Southern environment, the role of mentors in a writer’s development, and Southern politics and Southern literature. They will also give out some coveted awards, and four writers with Tennessee connections are among the honorees this week.
A PSA Award for Bachmann
April 13, 2011 Beth Bachmann, an assistant professor in the creative-writing program at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, has won the prestigious Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America. The prize, which carries a stipend of $1,000, is given to a work in progress.
A Book Deal, Even in a Bad Climate
April 12, 2011 Adam Prince, a Ph.D. candidate in creative writing at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, has sold his first collection of short stories, The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men. The book will appear late next year from Black Lawrence Press. This is the same publisher which will be bringing out a new poetry chapbook by Prince’s wife, Charlotte Pence. Clearly the Pence-Prince family is having a very good year in a very lousy publishing climate.
Celebrating America's Homer
April 11, 2011 On April 10, 1861, Brigadier General P.G.T. Beauregard, who led the Confederate forces at Charleston, South Carolina, demanded that the Union surrender Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. U.S. Major Robert Anderson refused. On April 12, the Confederates opened fire in the opening battle of the Civil War. To mark the 150th anniversary of this epic conflict, the Modern Library is reissuing Shelby Foote’s masterful three-volume history of the war, and PBS is once again airing the Ken Burns documentary that prominently featured interviews with Foote.
More Praise for Sepetys
April 8, 2011 The four starred reviews—one from every pre-publication review site in the industry—for Ruta Sepetys’s Between Shades of Gray was a pretty good clue that this debut YA novel was bound to be a big hit, but now the glowing reviews are really rolling in for the Nashville novelist.
