April 5, 2013 Debut collections from two acclaimed Tennessee poets display a healthy diversity of sensibilities in contemporary American poetry. Will Schutt’s Westerly and Joshua Robbins’s Praise Nothing deliver elegantly crafted verse and moving insight, but their perspectives are vastly different. Joshua Robbins will appear at Union Ave Books in Knoxville on April 7 at 3 p.m. He and Will Schutt will appear together at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 13 at 2 p.m.
March 12, 2013 Jesse Graves’s first poetry collection, Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine, has earned high acclaim, including the Appalachian Writers Association Book of the Year Award in poetry and the Weatherford Award, presented annually by Berea College and the Appalachian Studies Association. Such accolades are no surprise to those who have worked with Graves and followed his career. As novelist Ron Rash notes, “These poems have the music, wisdom, and singular voice of a talent fully realized, and make abundantly clear that Jesse Graves is one of America’s finest young poets.” Today Graves talks with Chapter 16 about writing, teaching, and his deep roots in Sharp’s Chapel, Tennessee.
February 11, 2013 David Huddle, author of seven story collections, three novels, seven volumes of poetry, and a book of advice for writers, holds the 2012-13 Roy Acuff Chair of Excellence at Austin Peay State University. Now seventy-one, he recently answered questions from Chapter 16 about a lifetime spent writing “narratives” in a variety of forms, how teaching has improved his own work, and why Philip Roth will probably write another novel. On February 12 at 7:30 p.m., Huddle will read from his 2011 novel, Nothing Can Make Me Do This, in Room 303 of the Morgan University Center at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville. The event is free and open to the public.
February 4, 2013 Poets are not immune to the rush of contemporary life. Too often, writing—even for a respected poet—comes to seem like an afterthought, the work that gets done when all other obligations are finally taken care of. The University of Tennessee’s Arthur Smith is the rare writer who eschews the noise of the world, sculpting a life of quiet contemplation. Smith is also a poet who offers the kind of deep yet accessible poems that readers seek but so rarely find. His fourth collection, The Fortunate Era, will be released February 26 by his longtime publisher, Carnegie Mellon University Press. Its bold, honest, lyrical reflections offer a respite from the noise of the world.
January 31, 2013 Using images of the natural world to convey a deeply spiritual vision, the poems in Jeff Hardin’s Notes for a Praise Book seem to speak directly to the reader. He has a knack for shaping phrases that capture the ordinary, fleeting impressions nature delivers, as well as the moments of beauty that usually go uncelebrated.
January 23, 2013 The Oxford American’s new editor-in-chief, Roger D. Hodge, talks with Chapter 16 about his view of editing as a “conversational” process. The point of the conversation, he says, is to serve the stories themselves: “When everything comes together in just the right way, so that the stories are winking and glancing across the issue at one another, something magical happens. You have a self-contained whole, a world within the world.”
