September 26, 2014 Amy Billone is a poet and a scholar who has published widely in both creative and academic journals. Her poetry collection, The Light Changes, was named a best book of the year in 2013 by Kirkus Reviews and won the 2014 IndieReader Discovery Award in Poetry. Billone, an Associate Professor of English at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, will give a free public reading at the University of Tennessee’s Hodges Library on September 29, 2014, at 7 p.m.
September 19, 2014 The poems in TJ Jarrett’s stunning second collection, Zion, are shaped by the desire to summon mercy and forgiveness in the face of terrible wrong, and they celebrate, without a trace of sentimentality, the sustaining power of love. TJ Jarrett will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on September 26, 2014, at 6:30 p.m. and again at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 10-12, 2014.
September 19, 2014 Let’s just go ahead and call 2014 Khaled Mattawa’s year: in January he was appointed chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and now he has been named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. What this most recent honor means in lay terms: Mattawa has just won a $625,000 “genius” grant.
August 22, 2014 Jeff Hardin is the author of two collections of poetry: Fall Sanctuary, recipient of the Nicholas Roerich Prize, and Notes for a Praise Book. His third collection, Restoring the Narrative, received the Donald Justice Poetry Prize and will be published in 2015. He is professor of English at Columbia State Community College in Columbia, Tennessee. Hardin will give a free public reading at the Scarritt-Bennett Center in Nashville on August 28, 2014, at 6 p.m.
August 11, 2014 Diann struggled with the legacy of being a Southern woman and poet, and I think she would have preferred to have been otherwise, perhaps a Boston Mandarin like her mentor, Helen Vendler. Confronting her heritage and making a conscious effort to be the poet she felt she ought to be are, I think, her most important achievements.
August 11, 2014 “I should note that I don’t consider myself a literary critic,” Diann Blakely once wrote. “Rather, I am a passionate, studious, unfashionably earnest reader and an advocate for the books—especially books of poetry—I care deeply about.” These words could serve almost as a mission statement for Blakely’s entire life, which ended on August 5.
