Poetry

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.

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.

May 22, 2012 Mitzi Cross and Malcolm Glass are married poets living in Clarksville, Tennessee. Cross is an award-winning poet, playwright, and photographer, whose work has appeared in numerous literary journals, art galleries, and juried exhibits across the mid-South. Glass is a writer and photographer who has published five books of poems and several textbooks, including Bone Love, In the Shadow of the Gourd, and Important Words. The two will appear together on May 24 at Scarritt-Bennett Center in Nashville at 7 p.m.

May 18, 2012 Charlotte Pence is a poet and critic who recently received her Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Tennessee. A regular Chapter 16 contributor, she is also the author of two award-winning chapbooks and the editor of The Poetics of American Song Lyrics (University Press of Mississippi, 2012). Her work has earned numerous Pushcart nominations, the Discovered Voices award, and a fellowship from the Tennessee Arts Commission. It has appeared in Kenyon Review Online, North American Review, Denver Quarterly, Rattle, Tar River Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, and many other journals. Pence and her husband, Adam Prince, will read from their new books on May 19 at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville. The event begins at 2 p.m.

April 25, 2012 Rachael Lyon grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. She is the author of The Normal Heart and How It Works (2011), winner of the 2010 White Eagle Coffee Store Press Poetry Chapbook Award and finalist for the 2010 Black River Chapbook Competition. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry from George Mason University and recently completed a Fulbright grant in Vienna, Austria, where she translated poetry from German. Her poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review’s Old & New: Re-Visions of the American South, Southern Humanities Review, and The Nashville Review, among others. At work on her first collection of poems, she is an academic adviser and creative-writing instructor at Penn State.