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:
May 27, 2011 Evie Shockley is the author of the new black (Wesleyan, 2011), a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press, 2006), and two chapbooks; she also co-edits jubilat. Schockley’s poetry and literary criticism have appeared in such journals and anthologies as Callaloo, The Southern Review, Pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture, Harvard Review, Center: A Journal of the Literary Arts, and Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. Born and raised in Nashville, she currently teaches African American literature and creative writing at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
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.
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.
