Poetry | Chapter 16

From Libya to the Academy of American Poets—By Way of Tennessee

Khaled Mattawa has been named co-chancellor of the nation’s largest nonprofit poetry organization

By Margaret Renkl | January 17, 2014

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.

“Watching a Woman on the M101 Express”

By Kamilah Aisha Moon | January 16, 2014

January 16, 2014 Nashville native Kamilah Aisha Moon has earned fellowships to the Prague Summer Writing Institute; the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts; Cave Canem; and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work has appeared in the Harvard Review, jubilat, and the Oxford American, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Moon will appear—along with TJ Jarrett and Beth Bachman —at Parnassus Books in Nashville on January 21 at 6:30 p.m.

New Anthology Spotlights Tennessee Poets

The Southern Poetry Anthology series turns toward Tennessee

By Quincy Rhoads | January 6, 2014

January 6, 2013 The literary culture of Tennessee is as varied as the landscape of the state, and The Southern Poetry Anthology captures this diversity in the breadth of its selections. From West Tennessee’s Lisa Roney to East Tennessee’s Jeff Daniel Marion, and from nationally celebrated poets like Charles Wright to less familiar talents like Jeff Hardin and Kevin Thomason, the anthology includes a broad array of talent.

Blitzkrieg

January 4, 2014

“Enter the war room by reading the book and discover how the poem ‘Portrait of an Inner Life’ was systemically posted throughout the United States in six months by organized street teams. See photographs of the posted stickers and follow the fates of the poem-filled glass bottles that were set adrift in Blitzkrieg.”

–from the publisher

From “A Map of the Lost World”

By Rick Hilles | December 13, 2013

December 13, 2013 Rick Hilles has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, a Camargo Fellowship, and, most recently, a 2013 Individual Artist Fellowship in Poetry from the Tennessee Arts Commission. He is the author of Brother Salvage, winner of the 2005 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and A Map of the Lost World (2012), and his poems have been published widely in literary magazines. He lives in Nashville and teaches poetry at Vanderbilt University. Hilles will read from his work on December 19, 2013, at 7 p.m. at the Scarritt-Bennett Center in Nashville. The event is free and open to the public.

Painting the Paradise That Used to Be

A new collection showcases the poetry of the late Wilmer Mills

By Tina LoTufo | November 25, 2013

November 25, 2013 Selected Poems by the late Wilmer Mills includes poems about building a house, plowing a field, and crafting a cradle, among others. This poet, who died in 2011 at age forty-one, writes from specific, hands-on experience but also sees beyond the ordinary to touch what is timeless in each act.

The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History

By Allen Boyer and Mark Nicholls
Routledge
340 pages
$180

The book “explores the reasons why treason coalesced around specific offences agreed by both the monarch and the wider political nation, why it became an essential instrument of enforcement in high politics, and why, over the past three hundred years, it has gradually fallen into disuse while remaining on the statute book.”

~the publisher