A Way to Break Out of Jail
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:
Poetry
A PSA Award for Bachmann
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.
"Now That We Have Tasted Hope"
April 5, 2011 The Libyan-born poet Khaled Mattawa has published several collections of his own poetry, including Tocqueville (2010), Amorisco (2008), Zodiac of Echoes (2003), and Ismailia Eclipse (1995) and has translated numerous volumes of contemporary Arabic poetry, including Shepherd of Solitude: Selected Poems of Amjad Nasser (2009) and Miracle Maker: Selected Poems of Fadhil Al-Azzawi (2004), in addition to co-editing the anthologies Dinarzad’s Children: An Anthology of Arab American Fiction (2004) and Post Gibran: Anthology of New Arab American Writing (1999). Mattawa, a graduate of the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, has been awarded several Pushcart Prizes and the PEN Award for Literary Translation, in addition to a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, and the Alfred Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University. He is a Ford/United States Artist for 2011 and recipient of the 2010 Academy of American Poets Fellowship Prize. In recent weeks, Mattawa has been a frequent commentator on the current situation in Libya.
A Griffin for Mattawa?
April 5, 2011 Khaled Mattawa is an international finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry announced today. The other three international finalists are Seamus Heaney, Philip Mosley, and Gjertrud Schnackenberg. The Griffin Prize is one of the most lucrative awards in poetry: each of the finalists will receive an honorarium of 10,000 dollars; the winner, who will be announced on June 1 in Toronto, will receive 65,000 dollars.
The Literary Majesty of the King James
March 30, 2011 Bobby Rogers’s debut collection of poems harnesses much of its power through the contraries it explores: realism and idealism, bitterness and hope, knowledge and mystery. Articulate, precise, and intense, Paper Anniversary delivers poem after poem that, in the words of the author, provide “a certain kind of attention and a desire to make sense of what it reveals.” Bobby C. Rogers will read from Paper Anniversary on April 4 at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
"Jungle Appetites"
March 23, 2011 Gaylord Brewer is a professor at Middle Tennessee State University, where he founded and edits the literary journal Poems & Plays. His most recent books are a collection of poetry, Give Over, Graymalkin (2011), and the comic novella, Octavius the 1st (2008), both from Red Hen Press. He has published more than 800 poems in journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry and The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Brewer has taught in the Czech Republic, England, Kenya, and Russia. In June 2011 he will be in residence at the Arteles Creative Center in Finland. He is a native of Louisville and earned a Ph.D. at Ohio State University. In 2009, he was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship by the Tennessee Arts Commission.
