Poems

May 18, 2012 Charlotte Pence is a poet and critic who recently received her Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Tennessee. A regular Chapter 16 contributor, she is also the author of two award-winning chapbooks and the editor of The Poetics of American Song Lyrics (University Press of Mississippi, 2012). Her work has earned numerous Pushcart nominations, the Discovered Voices award, and a fellowship from the Tennessee Arts Commission. It has appeared in Kenyon Review Online, North American Review, Denver Quarterly, Rattle, Tar River Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, and many other journals. Pence and her husband, Adam Prince, will read from their new books on May 19 at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville. The event begins at 2 p.m.

April 25, 2012 Rachael Lyon grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. She is the author of The Normal Heart and How It Works (2011), winner of the 2010 White Eagle Coffee Store Press Poetry Chapbook Award and finalist for the 2010 Black River Chapbook Competition. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry from George Mason University and recently completed a Fulbright grant in Vienna, Austria, where she translated poetry from German. Her poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review’s Old & New: Re-Visions of the American South, Southern Humanities Review, and The Nashville Review, among others. At work on her first collection of poems, she is an academic adviser and creative-writing instructor at Penn State.

April 12, 2012 R.B. Morris is a Knoxville poet and songwriter, solo performer and band leader, and a sometimes-playwright and actor. His books include Early Ires and Keeping the Bees Employed. His albums include Spies Lies and Burning Eyes and his most recent solo project, Rich Mountain Bound. He wrote and acted in The Man Who Lives Here is Loony, a one-man play taken from the life and work of James Agee. Morris served as the Jack E. Reese Writer-in-Residence at the University of Tennessee from 2004 to 2008 and was inducted into the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame in 2009. He will give a reading and a musical performance at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on April 12 at 6 p.m.

January 11, 2011 Georganne Harmon grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, where she and her husband now make their home. Her poems have appeared in various journals, including Pearl, Poem, Appalachian Voices, New Millennium Writings, Maypop, Slant, and others, and she has been the recipient of six awards by the Tennessee Writers Alliance and Tennessee Mountain Writers. A longtime teacher, Harmon conducts writing workshops for young people and adults. Italy, a second homeland to which she returns often, forms a part of her landscape. We Will Have Ghosts is her first book.

November 29, 2011 Set in modern-day Appalachia, Charlotte Pence’s new chapbook—Weaves a Clear Night, winner of the 2011 Flying Trout Press Chapbook Prize—recasts the myths surrounding Penelope’s fidelity to Odysseus. Lyrical, meditative, and deeply sensual, the poems follow the emotional isolation of a woman poised between two men, neither of whom can be a part of her daily life. Despite the absence of the lover and the husband, their presence surrounds her.

November 4, 2011 Melissa Range’s first book of poems, Horse and Rider, was a finalist for the 2011 Kate Tufts Discovery Prize and won the 2010 Walt McDonald Prize in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Hudson Review, New England Review, and others. She is a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a “Discovery” / The Nation prize, and she has held residencies at Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. A graduate of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, she is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in English and creative writing at the University of Missouri. “New Heavens, New Earth” originally appeared in Poetry London in 2006. Range will give a reading at the Hodges Library on the University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville on November 7 at 7 p.m. She will also appear (with Darius Antwan Stewart and Clay Matthews) at Rogers-Stout Hall on the campus of East Tennessee State University on November 8 at 7 p.m.