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.
July 15, 2014 Jesse Graves is an assistant professor of English at Johnson City’s East Tennessee State University. His first poetry collection, Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine, won the 2011 Weatherford Award in Poetry from Berea College and the Appalachian Studies Association. He is also co-editor of The Southern Poetry Anthology: Tennessee and author of a new collection, Basin Ghosts. Graves will read from 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 in Nashville October 10-12, 2014.
July 11, 2014 In his debut collection, Ghost Gear, poet Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum excavates and explores memories of his Nashville boyhood, revisiting the past with a rough mix of tender feeling and strong, sometimes violent imagery. He will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on July 19, 2014, at 6:30 p.m.
