Poetry

Bobby C. Rogers grew up in West Tennessee and was educated at Union University, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and the University of Virginia. His first book, Paper Anniversary, won the 2009 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize at University of Pittsburgh Press and will be published in fall, 2010. He is a professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. He lives in Memphis with his wife and son and daughter.

Kory Wells is breaking out of her career as a software developer with her first poetry collection, Heaven Was the Moon. Her novel-in-progress was a finalist in the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition, and Ladies’ Home Journal praised her “standout” essay in the anthology She’s Such a Geek. Wells and her family, long-time residents of Murfreesboro, are renovating a house in Bell Buckle.

Wyatt Prunty, a native of Humboldt, Tennessee, is the author of seven poetry collections, and his honors include fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation. Founding director of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, he teaches creative writing at the University of the South. To read an interview with Wyatt Prunty, please click here.

Charles Wright, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, and the Griffin Poetry Prize, grew up in Kingsport, Tennessee, and teaches at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Sestets is his nineteenth book of poems.

Diann Blakely, the author of three poetry collections, is a graduate of both the University of the South and Vanderbilt University. She studied at New York University, Harvard, and Boston University before earning an MFA from Vermont College. While still a work in progress, Cities of Flesh and the Dead, from which this poem is excerpted, won the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award.

John Egerton is an independent journalist and nonfiction author who lives in Nashville, Tennessee. His books include The Americanization of Dixie (1974), Generations (1983), Southern Food (1987), and Speak Now Against the Day (1994), for which he received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. His only work of fiction, Ali Dubyiah and the Forty Thieves, is a political satire.