“Upbringing”
February 19, 2016 William Wright is the author of nine poetry collections, including Tree Heresies (Mercer University Press, 2015), Night Field Anecdote (Louisiana Literature Press, 2011), Bledsoe (Texas Review Press, 2011), and Dark Orchard (Texas Review Press, 2005). His poems have recently appeared in The Kenyon Review, the Oxford American, The Antioch Review, Shenandoah, and the Southern Poetry Review. He currently serves as Writer in Residence at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He will give a free public reading at UT’s John C. Hodges Library on February 22, 2016, at 7 p.m.
February 8, 2016 Christina Stoddard is the author of Hive, which won the 2015 Brittingham Prize in Poetry from the University of Wisconsin Press. Along with TJ Jarrett, Stoddard will give a reading at Vanderbilt University in Nashville at 7 p.m. on February 11, 2016, in Buttrick Hall. The event is free and open to the public.
February 2, 2016 Star Line Books, Chattanooga’s only independent bookstore, opened last August just across Market Street from the famed Chattanooga Choo-Choo. Owner Star Lowe is passionate about books, her customers, and the Chattanooga community. She only wishes she had more time to read.
January 29, 2016 We look over the side of the pier and wonder where footholds might help a person up, but we can’t find any. We think of last night’s drinkers, one of whom might have stumbled in. We think of despair—so many homeless, so many loves gone bad—and we think of families, but we see no one who looks any more personally involved than simply considering the hazards of his own living.
January 8, 2016 When Philip Levine gave a poetry reading at Vanderbilt, the room was packed. But in his introduction to the event, Vereen Bell bypassed entirely the impressive literary credentials of the Pulitzer Prize-winner. He told, instead, the story of the Burger Bitch, how he had started talking with her one day as she went about her trash-dumping duties.