From the Chapter 16 archive: This type of travel is not meant to soothe; it’s not like a seven-day cruise where the aim is to make sure you never feel lost, unsure, or in want. This travel is about want. About loneliness. About insecurity. About all those things that go into the poems that stay with you, the ones that risk and surprise, that ache to be written, and that talk back to you on the page.
Richard Jackson has published 26 books, including 15 books of poems: most recently, Take Five (2020) and Broken Horizons (2018). He has been teaching at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga since 1976, where he directs the Meacham Writers’ Workshop.
Barbara E. Young is a Middle Tennessee native. She has known party lines, coonskin caps, hula hoops, transistor radios under the covers, 8-track, CD-ROM, Blogger, and Covid 19. She returned to writing poetry at age 60 and still has a lot to learn. Heirloom Language is her first full-length collection. Young will read from her work at Scarritt Bennett Center in Nashville on June 24.
Every Lash is Leigh Anne Couch’s second collection after Houses Fly Away (2007) and a chapbook, Green and Helpless (2008). Her poems are published widely in magazines including PANK, Gulf Coast, Subtropic, Smartish Pace, Nelle, and Cincinnati Review. Now a freelance editor, she was formerly at Duke University Press and The Sewanee Review. She lives in Sewanee with writer Kevin Wilson and their sons.
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.
