“Caretaker”
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.
Poetry
“February in Knoxville”
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.
“You, Reader”
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.
“Fawn in Sapsucker Woods”
Jesse Graves is the author of four poetry collections, including Basin Ghosts and Specter Mountain, a collaboration with William Wright. His work received the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He teaches at East Tennessee State University, where he is poet-in-residence and professor of English.
“My Therapist Tells Me I Keep Dating My Mother”
Destiny O. Birdsong is a Louisiana-born poet, fiction writer, and essayist. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and the MacDowell Colony and won the Academy of American Poets Prize. She earned her M.F.A. and Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University and lives in Nashville. Birdsong will appear at a virtual event hosted by Parnassus Books in Nashville on October 14.
“Suspect”
James E Cherry is the author of six books. His latest novel, Edge of the Wind, was published in 2016. His 2008 poetry collection, Honoring the Ancestors, was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Still a Man and Other Stories, a Lillian Smith Book Award nominee and a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award for Fiction, will be re-released by Willow Books in July 2020. Cherry has an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Texas at El Paso and resides in Jackson, Tennessee, with his wife, Tammy.
