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.”
December 21, 2012 Kevin Brown is a professor at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee. He is the author of one book of poetry, Exit Lines (Plain View Press, 2009), and two chapbooks: Abecedarium (Finishing Line Press, 2011) and Holy Days: Poems (winner of the 2011 Split Oak Press Chapbook Contest). He has also written a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again (Wipf and Stock, 2012), and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Story: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels (Kennesaw State University Press, 2012). He received his M.F.A from Murray State University.
December 10, 2012 In May 2011, Roy Burkhead was hit by a car at the intersection of Church Street and 2nd Avenue in downtown Nashville. (He was not seriously injured.) In many people, such an experience might spark musings on mortality, but for Burkhead it sparked the idea for a literary journal. “This event forced me to pause and look around,” he says. “I was interested to realize just how many different aspects of Nashville were represented from this particular spot of town. Maybe it was the impact of the bumper, but I started to ponder that this specific spot could work as a great metaphor, a virtual location in this actual city.” One year later, he published the first issue of 2nd & Church.
December 7, 2012 Clay Matthews has published poetry in journals such as The American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. His most recent book, Pretty, Rooster), is a collection of sonnets written in syllabics. His other books are Superfecta (Ghost Road Press, 2008) and RUNOFF (BlazeVox, 2009). He teaches at Tusculum College in Greeneville and edits poetry for the Tusculum Review.
December 3, 2012 In his second poetry collection, The Foundling Wheel, Blas Falconer writes about the complex emotions of new parenthood. Through rich and arresting imagery, he conveys a vivid sense of life’s most overwhelming love, as well as its effects and resonances within the family and beyond.
November 27, 2012 Author of seven books of poems, including a new and selected collection titled Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been), Chase Twichell applies her study of Buddhism to deliver well-chiseled, unsentimental poems that explore terrain not normally associated with Buddhist thought. Whether addressing hot-house irises, Dumpsters, or Chanel No. 5, her poems ponder questions that matter: what is the self, and why do we suffer? As a consequence, Twichell has been awarded many prestigious prizes, including the 2011 Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Award, which carries a $100,000 stipend, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artists Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Chase Twichell will read from her work on November 29, in Vanderbilt’s Buttrick Hall, Room 101, at 7 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
