From the Fiery Furnace to the Promise Land by Serina K. Gilbert and Learotha Williams Jr. chronicles the history of an extraordinary Tennessee community through the stories of its formerly enslaved founders and their descendants. The authors will discuss the book at the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville on September 13.
Night Train to Memphis is Richard Tillinghast’s 14th poetry collection. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New Republic, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. A native of Memphis, he currently lives in Hawaii and spends his summers in Tennessee.
Abby N. Lewis, a poet from Dandridge, Tennessee, is the author of the collection Reticent (2016) and two chapbooks. Her latest collection, Aquakineticist, explores the experience of growing up female in the American South.
Claudia Emerson won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2005 poetry collection, Late Wife, and served as the poet laureate of Virginia. She was a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and frequently taught at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She died in 2014. Ungrafted includes previously uncollected poems left in manuscript at the time of her death, as well as selections from her eight published collections.
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Tyler Friend was grown — and is still growing — in Tennessee and received their MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Friend is the author of a poetry chapbook, BUNKER, and Him or Her or Whatever is their first full-length collection.
Stephanie Niu is a poet and writer from Marietta, Georgia. I Would Define the Sun, her first full-length poetry collection, won the inaugural Vanderbilt University Literary Prize. She is also the author of the chapbooks Survived By: An Atlas of Disappearance and She Has Dreamt Again of Water. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, Literary Hub, Copper Nickel, Ecotone, and elsewhere.
