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.
Lisa Coffman, who grew up in East Tennessee, has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and Bucknell University’s Stadler Center for Poetry. Her first collection of poetry, Likely, won the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize from Kent State University Press. Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, including Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VI: Tennessee. She teaches at the California State Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo. “Born Under the Sign Of” is an excerpt from her new collection, Less Obvious Gods.
Elizabeth Cox’s poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Southern Poetry Review, The Atlantic, and others. Her fiction has won the O’Henry Prize, the Robert Penn Warren Award, and the Lillian Smith Award. Cox grew up in Chattanooga and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
Cynthia Robinson Young’s work has appeared in Sojourners, Poetry South, The Ekphrastic Review, and Catalpa: a magazine of Southern perspectives, among other journals and anthologies. She is a graduate student at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
Former Murfreesboro resident Allison Boyd Justus has worked for Tennessee’s community colleges and public schools as a library assistant, a teacher of English-language learners, and a teacher of intellectually gifted students.
