A Publication of Humanities Tennessee

“Digging the Pond”

July 9, 2012 Jesse Graves teaches writing and literature classes as an assistant professor of English at Johnson City’s East Tennessee State University, where he won a 2012 New Faculty Award from the College of Arts & Sciences. He completed a Ph.D. in English at the University of Tennessee, and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Cornell University. His first poetry collection, Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine, was published by Texas Review Press and won the 2011 Weatherford Award in Poetry from Berea College and the Appalachian Studies Association. Other work appears in recent or forthcoming issues of Prairie Schooner, Georgia Review, Appalachian Heritage, and Connecticut Review. Graves will read from the collection at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on July 14 at 3 p.m.

Tasty Reading

July 5, 2012 In a culture filled with so-called food porn, it’s perhaps surprising that Nashville’s Alimentum: The Literature of Food is the country’s first literary journal dedicated exclusively to themes of table, kitchen, market, and sustenance. In its pages—and in a revamped website, launching today—editor Paulette Licitra invites readers to consider food as a savory (or sweet) organizing principle, which writers can apply to themes as wide as human experience itself.

Messing Around with Veracity

July 2, 2012 A hybrid of essay, prose poems, and art criticism, Syzygy, Beauty quietly dodges literary expectations and resists parsing. While the book chronicles a universal strain of story—the bumpy course of a complicated relationship, a love triangle—it does so through an entirely new, occasionally gorgeous script, in language that is both direct and oblique. “How to describe the indescribable might as well be the title of this blurb,” the writer Ander Monson, with whom Fleischmann has studied, writes. “[It] resists being fenced in.”

“You Are Where You Come From”

June 26, 2012 Memphis native Don Share, poet and senior editor of Poetry magazine, has recently released his third poetry collection. In Wishbone, Share energizes his well-crafted lines with wit and hard-wrestled emotional truths. Many of the poems in Wishbone reflect on the transient nature of life and our attempts to muddle our way through loss. As Share explains in an interview with Chapter 16, “We’re always using whatever strength we have to grasp things, to hold on, and sometimes to wave goodbye.”

“You Are Where You Come From”

“What We Know Every Moon Takes”

June 1, 2012 Gordon Osing is retired from the writing program at the University of Memphis, where he started The River City Writers Series. He is the author of over a dozen books of both poetry and prose. Tom Carlson taught American literature and creative nonfiction at the University of Memphis for thirty-two years. He is the author of Hatteras Blues. The two will appear together at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis at 5:30 p.m. on June 7 to read from and sign copies of their recent collaboration, a collection of poetry and collage, La Belle Dame. The reading will begin at 6 p.m. Other books by both authors will also be available for signing.

"The Returning Dead"

May 28, 2012 Wyatt Prunty, a native of Humboldt, Tennessee, is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently The Lover’s Guide to Trapping. His honors include fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation. Founding director of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, he teaches creative writing at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee.

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