February 8, 2012 The Society of Authors has awarded Khaled Mattawa the £3,000 Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize at a London event to celebrate literature in translation. The prizewinning collection is Selected Poems by Syrian poet Adonis. Poetry doesn’t often yield riches of the monetary kind, but Mattawa is on something of a roll where lucrative literary prizes are concerned.
February 2, 2012 Poet, translator, critic, professor: these are former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky’s day jobs. After hours, he also writes the poetry column for Slate, appears on television shows like The Simpsons and The Colbert Report, performs with jazz bands, and has shared the stage with Bruce Springsteen. If America can claim a Public Man of Letters, Pinsky is it. He will give a free public lecture, “The Value of the Arts and Humanities in Education and Society,” sponsored by the University of Tennessee and the Benwood Foundation in Chattanooga, on February 7 at 7 p.m. in the Roland Hayes Auditorium of the UTC Fine Arts Building. The event is free and open to the public.
January 11, 2011 Georganne Harmon grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, where she and her husband now make their home. Her poems have appeared in various journals, including Pearl, Poem, Appalachian Voices, New Millennium Writings, Maypop, Slant, and others, and she has been the recipient of six awards by the Tennessee Writers Alliance and Tennessee Mountain Writers. A longtime teacher, Harmon conducts writing workshops for young people and adults. Italy, a second homeland to which she returns often, forms a part of her landscape. We Will Have Ghosts is her first book.
January 6, 2012 In honor of the achievements of Eleanor Ross Taylor, and to mark her passing last Friday, Chapter 16 contacted poets and novelists around the country to ask for their impressions of a writer who spent much of her literary life in the shadow of her husband, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Peter Taylor, but who quietly continued her own work with passion and dedication during their fifty-one years together—and for more than a decade beyond his death. Through the comments of Betty Adcock, Richard Bausch, Claudia Emerson, Mark Jarman, Don Share, Dave Smith, and R.T. Smith, what emerges is a collaborative portrait of a woman who was quiet, modest, and gentle but whose poems were uncompromising, sharp, and (in a word that comes up again and again) fierce.
December 14, 2011 With four new books published in 2011, including two short-story collections (Notes Toward the Story and Other Stories and I’ll Give You Something to Cry About), a novel (Gardner Remembers) and a volume of poetry (Before the Great Troubling), Memphis author and bookseller Corey Mesler has had a very busy year. Chapter 16 surveys the wealth of his words.
November 29, 2011 Set in modern-day Appalachia, Charlotte Pence’s new chapbook—Weaves a Clear Night, winner of the 2011 Flying Trout Press Chapbook Prize—recasts the myths surrounding Penelope’s fidelity to Odysseus. Lyrical, meditative, and deeply sensual, the poems follow the emotional isolation of a woman poised between two men, neither of whom can be a part of her daily life. Despite the absence of the lover and the husband, their presence surrounds her.
