Poetry | Chapter 16

Branches

Poet Charlotte Pence writes a prize-winning chapbook

By Margaret Renkl | January 10, 2011

January 10, 2011 Charlotte Pence, a Chapter 16 contributor and Ph.D. candidate in the creative-writing program at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, has just won the Black River Chapbook Competition. Pence’s collection, Branches, will be published by Black Lawrence Press. Given the general current publishing climate, not to mention the market for poetry in particular, Pence is understandably thrilled: “As a young writer, I spent a lot of energy worrying about if someone would read what I spent months writing.

In Her Own Right

A poet considers the lasting influence of Eleanor Ross Taylor

By Diann Blakely | December 28, 2010

December 28, 2010 Diann Blakely met Eleanor Ross Taylor—poet and widow of Peter Taylor—nearly twenty years ago in Sewanee, Tennessee. For years, until Mrs. Taylor’s age and health began to limit her activity, the two renewed their friendship each summer in Sewanee, writing letters in between. On the publication of Taylor’s Captive Voices, Blakely remembers the poet who gave her the best advice of her life. In 2010, her 91st year, Eleanor Ross Taylor won the Poetry Society’s prestigious Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (and $100,000) and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

NEA Fellowship for Falconer

By Serenity Gerbman | November 24, 2010

November 24, 2010 The good news keeps coming for Tennessee writers. This week, Blas Falconer, associate professor of English at Austin Peay State University, received a National Endowment for the Arts 2011 Fellowship in Literature. One of forty-two poets from around the country selected, Falconer will receive $25,000 with the award.

Writing the World

Kate Daniels talks with Chapter 16 about her new poetry collection, A Walk in Victoria’s Secret

By Charlotte Pence | November 16, 2010

November 16, 2010 Poet Kate Daniels recently published her much anticipated fourth collection, A Walk in Victoria’s Secret. A professor in Vanderbilt’s creative-writing program, Daniels has received numerous honors, including the 2011 Hanes Award for Poetry, which has been given by the Fellowship of Southern Writers. She recently answered questions about her work via email prior to her reading on November 17 in Nashville at Vanderbilt’s Buttrick Hall, room 102, at 7 p.m. The event is open to the public.

In Memoriam

Diann Blakely appears in Best American Poetry

By Margaret Renkl | November 11, 2010

November 12, 2010 In today’s edition of The Best American Poetry Diann Blakely writes of “close friends / Who mute a howling loneliness with cards.” Read the full poem, a valediction for poet William Matthews, here. To read her prose remembrance of Matthews, click here.

Rebel, Rebel

Poet Reid Ward contemplates life, love, and responsibility from the confines of his “cage”

By Paul V. Griffith | October 19, 2010

October 19, 2010 Reid Ward is a preacher’s kid, and like of lot of “PK”s, he’s a natural-born insurgent. During high school, Ward was bright and likeable but not exactly focused on academics. More than anything, he hated his English classes—“I don’t remember ever reading a book all the way through until after high school,” he says. When he was eighteen, Ward fell from the roof of his family home and broke his neck. Paralyzed from the chest down, he ultimately discovered a lifeline in literature. Reid Ward reads from his new poetry collection, The Atrophy of the Sun, at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on October 19 at 7 p.m.

I Gotta Sing!

By Alice Faye Duncan
WaterBrook
40 pages
$14.99

“A whole barnyard makes noise ‘in the Spirit of joy’ throughout this raucous picture book, a sweetly heartwarming sing-along by Duncan. Kellam conveys comfort and happiness as the loved ones reflect sunny enthusiasm in this gladdening rendition of the Black American religious folk song ‘I’m Goin’a Sing When the Spirit Says Sing.’”

~Publishers Weekly