September 17, 2010 The Academy of American Poets announced this week that Khaled Mattawa, a graduate of the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, has been awarded the 2010 Academy Fellowship. Awarded once a year “for distinguished poetic achievement,” the fellowship carries a stipend of $25,000.
September 17, 2010 Tina Barr’s book, The Gathering Eye, won the Editor’s Prize at Tupelo Press. She has received Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her poems have been published or will shortly appear in Shenandoah, The Antioch Review, The Notre Dame Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Witness. Barr teaches at Rhodes College in Memphis.
September 15, 2010 Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets brings together a group of accomplished writers to discuss the mysterious craft of writing poetry. Poet and Austin Peay professor Blas Falconer, one of the book’s editors, speaks to Chapter 16 about the collection, and about his own creative process.
September 10, 2010 Susan O’Dell Underwood is the director of creative writing at Carson-Newman College in Jefferson City, Tennessee, where she has taught Appalachian literature, modern poetry, and writing for than twenty years. She earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the PhD in English from Florida State University. In 2004, her novel-in-progress, Genesis Road, won the Tennessee Arts Commission grant for writing. Her first chapbook, From, about family and cultural influence in the mountain South, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Underwood is originally from Bristol, Tennessee.
September 3, 2010 Clay Matthews has published work in The American Poetry Review, Spinning Jenny, Willow Springs, The JournalMuffler (H_NGM_N B_ _KS) and Western Reruns (available for free download online from End & Shelf Books). His first full-length collection, Superfecta, was released by Ghost Road Press in 2008, and a second, Runoff, was recently released from BlazeVOX Books. He teaches at Tusculum College in Greeneville, Tennessee, and edits poetry for The Tusculum Review.
August 26, 2010 Bill Brown has combined a lifelong vocation as a poet with a distinguished teaching career, including twenty years at Nashville’s Hume-Fogg Academic Magnet high school. He recently published his fourth collection of poems, The News Inside. He answered questions about his earliest efforts as a poet, his philosophy of teaching, and the future of poetry in the Internet age.
