Poetry

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.

April 12, 2012 R.B. Morris is a Knoxville poet and songwriter, solo performer and band leader, and a sometimes-playwright and actor. His books include Early Ires and Keeping the Bees Employed. His albums include Spies Lies and Burning Eyes and his most recent solo project, Rich Mountain Bound. He wrote and acted in The Man Who Lives Here is Loony, a one-man play taken from the life and work of James Agee. Morris served as the Jack E. Reese Writer-in-Residence at the University of Tennessee from 2004 to 2008 and was inducted into the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame in 2009. He will give a reading and a musical performance at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on April 12 at 6 p.m.