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.
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.
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.
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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.
John Gosslee
Rain Mountain Press
57 pages
$10
“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
