April 3, 2014 Visitations by John Bensko, a professor of English at the University of Memphis, has been awarded the Anita Claire Scharf Award from the University of Tampa Press. Bensko will read from the newly released collection at the Jackson Madison County Library on April 3, 2014, at noon. The event is free and open to the public.
Prior to her Memphis appearance, Shakespearean scholar Marjorie Garber talks with Chapter 16 about the pleasures of reading and the value of the humanities
March 20, 2014 Marjorie Garber believes that the way we read Shakespeare’s plays tells us as much about ourselves as it does about the Bard himself. In an interview with Chapter 16, Garber discusses her approach to Shakespeare, her love of literature, and her commitment to intellectual speculation. She will speak at Rhodes College in Memphis on March 27, 2014, at 7 p.m. Her talk, “Occupy Shakespeare: Shakespeare and/in the Humanities,” is free and open to the public.
February 28, 2014 R.B. Morris is a Knoxville poet, songwriter, solo performer, band leader, and a sometimes-playwright and actor. He has published books of poetry and music albums, and he wrote and acted in The Man Who Lives Here Is Loony, a one-man play taken from the life and work of writer James Agee. He was inducted into the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame in 2009. R.B. Morris will read from The Mockingbird Poems at the John C. Hodges Library Auditorium on the University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville on March 3, 2014, at 7 p.m. The reading is free and open to the public.
February 13, 2014 Jeff Daniel Marion, a native of Rogersville, taught English and creative writing at Carson-Newman University for over thirty-five years. He has published nine poetry collections, four chapbooks, and a children’s book, Hello, Crow. On February 13, 2014, at 7:30 p.m., Marion will give a free public reading at the Paul Meek Library on the campus of the University of Tennessee in Martin.
January 31, 2014 Gary L. McDowell is the author of Weeping at a Stranger’s Funeral (Dream Horse Press, 2014), American Amen (Dream Horse Press, 2010), and They Speak of Fruit (Cooper Dillon Books, 2009), and he is the co-editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry (Rose Metal Press, 2010). His poems and lyric essays are forthcoming in The Nation, Prairie Schooner, Quarter After Eight, and others. McDowell lives in Antioch, Tennessee, and is an assistant professor of English at Belmont University in Nashville. On January 31, 2014, at 7 p.m. he will appear—along with poets TJ Jarrett and Jeff Hardin—at Barnes & Noble Vanderbilt in Nashville. The event, part of the Lyrical Brew reading series, is free and open to the public.
Khaled Mattawa has been named co-chancellor of the nation’s largest nonprofit poetry organization
January 17, 2014 Poet and translator Khlaled Mattawa left Libya when when he was fourteen, the year after Muammar Gaddafi’s forces began hanging “traitors” in the public square of Benghazi, Mattawa’s home city. Mattawa settled in Chattanooga, where he later graduated from UTC before going on to study creative writing at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. In the years since, his commitment to both his homeland and to poetry has not waned.
