Tara Mae Mulroy is the author of the full-length poetry collection Swallow and the chapbook Philomela. A graduate of the M.F.A. program in poetry at the University of Memphis, she currently manages Nightjar Review, freelances, and teaches Latin.
Born in New York and raised in Nashville, Haviland Whiting is a 2019 United States Youth Poet Laureate Ambassador and the 2018 Nashville Youth Poet Laureate. She is a senior at Harpeth Hall School. And What Would You Say If You Could? is her first published collection of poetry.
Carolyn Welch is a writer and a pediatric nurse practitioner. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Gulf Coast, Poet Lore, Bellevue Literary Review, Sundog, Tar River Poetry, The Southeast Review, The Minnesota Review, and other literary journals. She lives in Norris, Tennessee.
Stellasue Lee is a co-host, with Linda Parsons, of WordStream, a weekly reading series in Knoxville. She was founding editor of Rattleand is now editor emerita. Dr. Lee received her Ph.D. from Honolulu University. Winner of the grand prize of Poetry to Aide Humanity by Al Falah in Malaysia, she now teaches privately.
Bill Brown grew up in West Tennessee ten miles from the Mississippi River. He is the author of eight poetry collections and a writing textbook. Formerly the director of the writing program at Hume-Fogg Academic High School in Nashville, he was named a Distinguished Teacher in the Arts in 1995 by the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts and the 2011 Writer of the Year by the Tennessee Writers Alliance. His latest book is The News Inside. “When the Dust Settles” is from his 2008 collection, Late Winter.
As she was coming of age in Nashville in the 1950s, there were many places award-winning children’s author Patricia McKissack was not allowed to go. She remembers hotels and restaurants that forbade African Americans entry, and movie theaters with a separate doorway in the alley for black patrons. The farthest reaches of the Grand Ole Opry’s balcony, known as the buzzard’s roost, was the only seating open to African Americans, McKissack recalls. She never partook: “My grandfather said that watermelons would bloom in January if any of his children went down there. ‘We don’t sit in no buzzard’s roost,’ he said. ‘We’re human beings, not buzzards.'”
