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.
July 25, 2014 Kendra DeColo’s Thieves in the Afterlife was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2013 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Southern Indiana Review, Calyx, Best Indie Lit of New England, and elsewhere, and she has taught writing workshops in prisons, middle schools, and homeless shelters. Kendra DeColo will appear at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville October 10-12, 2014. All festival events are free and open to the public.
July 15, 2014 There is abundant love and tender memory in poet Jesse Graves’s new collection, Basin Ghosts, but Graves also goes gracefully into some of the most difficult territory of life. Graves will discuss Basin Ghosts at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on July 26, 2014, at 2 p.m., and at the Southern Festival of Books, which will be held at Legislative Plaza in Nashville October 10-12, 2014.
