Wandering Down a New Road
August 2, 2012 Charlotte Pence, a Chapter 16 contributor who received her Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Tennessee, has been busy lately.
Poetry
Spreading Like Wildfire
July 30, 2012 Marilyn Kallet, English professor and director of the creative writing program at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, has made yet another splash in the poetry world. Kallet has written fifteen books, and her works continue to be circulated regularly throughout various poetry websites and publications.
Faithful Humanist
July 25, 2012 Poet Mark Jarman rose to prominence in the 1980s as an advocate of New Formalism and narrative poetry. He has since become known as one of the few academic poets of his generation to struggle explicitly in his work with questions of faith. In advance of the publication of his latest collection, Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems, he talks with Chapter 16 about his work, the flawed genius of Robinson Jeffers, and why the digital revolution is good for poetry. Jarman will read from Bone Fires at the twenty-fourth annual Southern Festival of Books, held October 12-14 at Legislative Plaza in Nashville. All events are free and open to the public.
“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.”
