Stellasue Lee is a co-host, with Linda Parsons, of WordStream, a weekly reading series in Knoxville. She was founding editor of Rattleand is now editor emerita. Dr. Lee received her Ph.D. from Honolulu University. Winner of the grand prize of Poetry to Aide Humanity by Al Falah in Malaysia, she now teaches privately.
Cara Dees is the author of Exorcism Lessons in the Heartland, winner of the 2018 Barrow Street Book Prize. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Best New Poets, Harvard Review, and Poetry Daily. A Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cincinnati, she holds an M.F.A. from Vanderbilt University. Dees will appear at the 2019 Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville on October 11-13.
Linda Parsons’ poetry has appeared in The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, and Shenandoah, among many other journals and anthologies. She is playwright-in-residence for The Hammer Ensemble, the social justice wing of Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville. Candescent is her fifth poetry collection.
Kory Wells recently served two terms as the Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, where she founded and manages the reading series Poetry in the Boro. Her work has appeared in James Dickey Review, Ruminate, The Southern Poetry Anthology: Tennessee, and other publications. Wells will discuss Sugar Fix at the 2019 Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville on October 11-13.
Beth Bachmann is a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow and the author of three award-winning poetry collections: Temper, Do Not Rise, and CEASE. She serves as writer-in-residence in the M.F.A. program in creative writing at Vanderbilt University. Bachmann will read from her work at Vanderbilt University on August 29.
Bill Brown grew up in West Tennessee ten miles from the Mississippi River. He is the author of eight poetry collections and a writing textbook. Formerly the director of the writing program at Hume-Fogg Academic High School in Nashville, he was named a Distinguished Teacher in the Arts in 1995 by the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts and the 2011 Writer of the Year by the Tennessee Writers Alliance. His latest book is The News Inside. “When the Dust Settles” is from his 2008 collection, Late Winter.
