Poetry

June 3, 2011 “Anything So Utterly Destroyed” by Elizabeth McClellan, a Gallatin-based poet and University of Memphis law student, has been nominated for a 2011 Rhysling Award by the Science Fiction Poetry Association. The Rhysling is a prize given to the best science-fiction, fantasy, or horror poem published during the previous year.

June 1, 2011 At thirteen, an age when many kids are developing the musical preferences they will carry with them for a lifetime, Khaled Mattawa emigrated to the U.S., eventually graduating from the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga and going on to graduate studies in creative writing at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Now an acclaimed poet, Mattawa left his native Libya after Muammar Qaddafi seized power, but he carried Libya’s music with him.

May 31, 2011 Last night in commemoration of Memorial Day, PBS closed The News Hour with a feature on Sewanee poet Wyatt Prunty, whose poem “The Returning Dead” was inspired by the program’s nightly “honor roll” of Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. (The program first aired in 2006.) Prunty is no stranger to combat—he served in Vietnam—though he claims no heroics: “I was a nearsighted gunnery officer, and I don’t think I hurt anyone,” he explains in an introduction to his reading of the poem. It begins this way:

April 15, 2011 In an interview in the Southern Literary Review, Vanderbilt poet Kate Daniels explains her seemingly unlikely kinship with another great poet associated with the Vanderbilt English Department:

April 13, 2011 Beth Bachmann, an assistant professor in the creative-writing program at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, has won the prestigious Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America. The prize, which carries a stipend of $1,000, is given to a work in progress.