Melissa Range’s poetry collection Printer’s Fist, awarded the 2025 Vanderbilt University Literary Prize, draws on archival research into 19th-century antislavery newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsides. Range will appear at the 2026 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 17-18.
Titanfall, Noah Soltau’s debut poetry collection, was shortlisted for the Arthur Smith Poetry Prize. Soltau’s recent work appears in Cutleaf, storySouth, and elsewhere, and he is the managing editor of The Red Branch Review. Raised in Chattanooga and educated in the South and Germany, Soltau lives with his wife and two daughters in East Tennessee.
In three recent poetry collections — Stephanie Niu’s I Would Define the Sun, Richard Tillinghast’s Night Train to Memphis, and Abby N. Lewis’ Aquakineticist — the nonhuman world offers potent spaces which alchemize human memory and reflection.
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.
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Former Knoxvillian Tom Lombardo is a poet, essayist, and freelance medical writer who lives in Midtown Atlanta. His poems have appeared in Southern Poetry Review, Ambit, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, and New York Quarterly, among others. He is the editor of an anthology, After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life Shattering Events, and is the poetry series editor for Press 53. His M.F.A. is from Queens University of Charlotte.
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Joy Harjo, who served three terms as U.S. Poet Laureate, is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee Creek Nation.
