Poetry

May 21, 2010 Ashley McWaters grew up in Memphis. Her work has appeared in DIAGRAM, Painted Bride Quarterly, Hunger Mountain, and Northwest Review, among others. Her debut book of poetry, Whitework, twice a finalist for the National Poetry Series, explores sewing as synecdoche for the whole of women’s work. McWaters teaches at the University of Alabama, where she directs the undergraduate creative writing program. She will read from Whitework at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on May 22 at 1 p.m.

May 14, 2010 Stephanie Pruitt is a poet and teaching artist with community-based organizations including Youth Speaks Nashville and the Magdalene House. A Cave Canem Fellow and member of the Affrilachian Poets, Pruitt received the 2010 Academy of American Poets Prize, the 2009 Sedberry Prize, was a finalist for Poets and Writers’ Magazine‘s Maureen Egen Award, and was named one of “Forty Favorite Poets” by Essence magazine in honor of its fortieth anniversary. This week she will receive her Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Vanderbilt University. Pruitt lives with her family in Nashville.

May 13, 2010 Linda Parsons Marion is the author of two poetry collections, Home Fires and Mother Land. For fourteen years she served as poetry editor of Now & Then magazine and has received literary fellowships from the Tennessee Arts Commission and Associated Writing Programs, and her poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Shenandoah, and Prairie Schooner, among other journals and anthologies. She is an editor at the University of Tennessee and lives in Knoxville with her husband, poet Jeff Daniel Marion.