Poems

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.

October 6, 2011 Bill Brown has written four poetry collections, three chapbooks, and a textbook. The recipient of many awards and fellowships, Brown lives in the hills of Robertson County with his wife, Suzanne, and a tribe of cats. He wrote “The Faraway Nearby” for an exhibition called Fragments: Poets and Artists of the South and Southwest at the Harrington Brown Gallery in Memphis. Brown’s poem is a response to a photograph of the work of Carolyn Hinske, a fiber artist based in Taos, New Mexico. Read more about Fragments here.

September 8, 2011 Near the end of his writing life George Scarbrough (1915-2008) used an alter ego, writing in the voice of the legendary eighth-century Chinese poet, Han-shan, whose poems were simple, direct, and frank, never failing to call attention to the flaws in society as he saw them. Writing in the voice of Han-shan gave Scarbrough the means to speak directly about the social abuses he saw around him but could not address so clearly in his own first-person voice. “At the Last Festival” appears in Under the Lemon Tree, a new, posthumously published collection of Scarbrough’s Han-shan poems. Robert Cumming, the book’s editor, will discuss George Scarbrough and his work at the 2011 Southern Festival of Books, held October 14-16 in Nashville.