Kendra DeColo is the author of two previous poetry collections, My Dinner with Ron Jeremy (2016) and Thieves in the Afterlife (2014). She is a recipient of a 2019 Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and has taught creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and Vanderbilt University. She’ll discuss I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers from the World at a virtual event hosted by Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 23.
Shuly Xóchitl Cawood’s Trouble Can Be So Beautiful at the Beginning won the 2019 Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry. Cawood is the author of the memoir The Going and Goodbye, the inspirational little book 52 Things I Wish I Could Have Told Myself When I Was 17, and the short story collection A Small Thing to Want. She lives in Johnson City. She’ll appear with Ciona Rouse and Larry Thacker at a virtual event hosted by East Tennessee State University on March 3.
Gaylord Brewer is a professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro. His books include a cookbook-memoir, The Poet’s Guide to Food, Drink, & Desire, and Worship the Pig, from which this poem is excerpted.
Erin Elizabeth Smith is the creative director at Sundress Academy for the Arts and the managing editor of Sundress Publications. Down is her third full-length poetry collection. Her poems have appeared in Guernica, Ecotone, Mid-American, Tupelo Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, and Willow Springs, among others. She is a Distinguished Lecturer in the English department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and in 2017 she was inducted into the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame.
Major Jackson is the author of five volumes of poetry, including Roll Deep and Leaving Saturn, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. In January 2021, he will join the Vanderbilt University faculty as Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English.
William Woolfitt is the author of three poetry collections, including Beauty Strip and Charles of the Desert. His poems, short stories, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, Blackbird, Image, Tin House, The Threepenny Review, and other journals. He’s an associate professor of English at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee.
