Archives: Authors

Gordon Osing grew up in Central Illinois and Western Missouri, where he attended pre-theological high school and junior college. He taught elementary schools in suburban St. Louis and Independence, Missouri and high schools in Chicago and rural Alma, Missouri for ten years before heading back to campus at the University of Arkansas, for an MFA in Poetry in 1973.

Attending the American Poets Series at the Jewish Community Center in Kansas City in the late Sixties and early Seventies inspired him to invest himself in poetry. Writers such as David Wagoner, Karl Jay Shapiro, Nancy Willard, Gwendolyn Brooks, Howard Nemerov, and Richard Wilbur showed a way to make private preoccupations and experiences into a sensibility that could, in turn, invent artifacts in the traditions of belles lettres. Poetry became a way of keeping to private matters by making them into poetic artifacts. In Howard Nemerov’s phrase, the “fictive self” took over the quest for self-expression.

Osing came to the University of Memphis (then Memphis State University) in 1973 and founded the River City Writers Series in 1976. The River City Series, now in its twenty-first season and under student management, has brought ninety writers of poetry, fiction and belletristic nonfiction to the University, and is the center-piece of the Creative Writing program of the English Department.

In 1982, he won the University’s Walter R. Smith Distinguished Book Award and published his first full-length collection From the Boundary Waters. He had edited The Good People of Gomorrah, a Memphis miscellany, for St. Luke’s Press in 1979. St. Luke’s also published Osing’s second full length collection, with prose commentary to meld the poems together, A Town Down-river, in 1985.

In 1986, Osing accepted the invitation of the University to be the first exchange professor with Central China Normal University, during which time he created, with graduate student Min Xiaohong and Professor Huang Hai-peng, a collection of fifty ci poems by China’s famous Su Shi (Su Dong-p’o). The Henan Provincial Press, in Zhengzhou, published that collection in 1990.

The success of that year led to a Senior Fulbright lectureship in American Studies at the (British) Hong Kong University in 1989, where further partnership with Huang and Min produced a second book of Song Dynasty ci poems, this time by the remarkable female author Li Qing-zhao. In 1992, the Henan Press published also this volume, Forever Tonight at My Window. Osing’s Fulbright was extended a year so he could help the faculties there establish an American Studies Program.

At Hong Kong University, Osing worked with poet-novelist Leung Ping- kwan on a collection of poems and an interview focussed on Hong Kong as an artistic venue after the June 4 massacre in Beijing. Essayist Akbar Abbas joined them to produce a volume on Hong Kong as a post-modern metropolis, City at the End of Time, published by the HKU Comparative Literature Department and Twilight Books of Hong Kong in 1992.

Back at the University of Memphis, in 1995, Osing joined with Chinese scholar Dr. De-an Wu-Swihart, to produce a collection of the poems by China’s first contemporary feminist author Shu Ting, published by The Chinese Literature Press, in Beijing, under their logo Panda Books.

His new chapbook, Crossing Against the Sun (Poetry New York, 1999, 17 pp.) presents his return from Asia in the summer of 1990, and the full length collection, The Water Radical, published by Iris Press, presents poems from his notebooks during three years in China and Southeast Asia. in these poems, Osing looks at “the Asia of ourselves.” It is not so much that he sees a China no one else has seen, but that he has looked back to Euro-America from perspectives inspired by China experience. Perhaps the continuousness of Chinese cultural moments offers commentary on our discontinuities.

Osing and his wife now live lakeside in the woods in northern Mississippi in a cypress house of their own design, teaching still at the University of Memphis, but writing close to full time.

Gaylord Brewer is author of 15 books of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and literary criticism, including the novella Octavius the 1^st (Red Hen, 2008), the poetry collection Country of Ghost (Red Hen Press, 2015), the cookbook-memoir The Poet’s Guide to Food, Drink, & Desire (Stephen F. Austin UP, 2015), and most recently a 10^th volume of poetry, The Feral Condition (Negative Capability, 2017). Nearly 1000 individual poems have been published in such journals and anthologies as The Bedford Introduction to Literature and Best American Poetry.

 

Brewer was awarded a Tennessee Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship in 2009. He has had numerous international writing residencies—including at Hawthornden Castle (Scotland), the Fundación Valparaíso (Spain), and the Global Arts Village (India)—and has taught in Russia, Kenya, and the Czech Republic. He earned a Ph.D. from Ohio State University and has been a member of the Middle Tennessee State University Department of English since 1993.

Andrea Potos is the author of six poetry collections, including  An Ink Like Early Twilight and We Lit the Lamps Ourselves, both from Salmon Poetry, and Yaya’s Cloth from Iris Press.   She received the William Stafford Prize for Poetry from Rosebud Magazine,  the James Hearst Poetry Prize from the North American Review, and three Outstanding Achievement Awards in Poetry from the Wisconsin Library Association.  Her work appears widely in journals and anthologies in print and online, including Poetry East, Atlanta Review, Ascent, Southern Poetry Review, Tiferet Journal, The First Day, Serving House Journal, Sou’wester, Nimrod International Journal, Women’s Review of Books, Literary Mama, The Mom Egg, Heron Tree and many others.  She lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her family.

Rebecca McClanahan’s ten published books include The Tribal Knot, Word Painting, and The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings, winner of the Glasgow Award in nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize series, Boulevard, The Sun, The Kenyon Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Brevity, and numerous other journals and anthologies. McClanahan teaches in the MFA programs of Queens University and Rainier Writing Workshop and in the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop.

www.rebeccamcclanahanwriter.com

Luke Whisnant’s In the Debris Field won the 2018 Bath Flash Fiction International Novella-in-Flash Award. His novel Watching TV with the Red Chinese was made into an independent film in 2011. His other books include the short story collection Down in the Flood and two poetry chapbooks. He teaches creative writing at East Carolina University, and edits the journal Tar River Poetry.

Susan Donnelly is the author of three full poetry collections and five chapbooks. She was born and raised near Boston, Massachusetts, a member of a large extended family whose spirit and histories are integral to her writing. Her first book of poetry, Eve Names the Animals (1985), won the inaugural Samuel French Morse Prize from Northeastern University. Its title poem has been included in The Norton Introduction to Poetry since 1996, and has also appeared in several other anthologies and textbooks. Her books Transit and Capture the Flag were published by Iris Press in 2001 and 2009. Her two newest chapbooks are Sweet Gooseberries (2015), a sequence of poems on childhood, and The Path of Thunder (2017), poems about race in America.

 

Her poems have been published in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry and many other journals in the United States, as well as in Ireland, England and France. They appear in many anthologies, textbooks, syllabi, websites and blogs. Three poems are included in the anthology The Book of Irish-American Poetry, 18^th Century to the Present (Notre Dame University Press 2007). Poems from both Transit and Capture the Flag have been featured several times on Poetry Daily and in Garrison Keillor’s Poets Almanac. The opening poem in Transit was chosen for statewide discussion in 2015 in the Common Threads program from the Massachusetts Poetry Festival.

 

Donnelly has been a fellow at The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. A founder of the 37-year-old workshop of poetry colleagues, Every Other Thursday, she lives, writes and teaches poetry in Arlington, Massachusetts.

 

www.susandonnellypoetry.com

Geraldine Connolly was born in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. She earned a B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh and and an M.A. from the University of Maryland. For seven years she served as co-editor of the literary quarterly, Poet Lore.  She is author of a chapbook, The Red Room, and three full-length poetry collections: Food for the Winter (Purdue), Province of Fire (Iris Press) and Hand of the Wind (Iris Press). Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Cortland Review and Shenandoah. It has been anthologized in Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High School Students, Sweeping Beauty: Poems About Housework, and The Doll Collection.

 

She has won many awards, including two fellowships from the National Endowment for The Arts, the Margaret Bridgman Fellowship of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, a Maryland Arts Council fellowship and the Yeats Society of New York Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Ted Kooser’s column, American Life in Poetry and has been broadcast on Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac, as well as Grace Cavalieri’s The Poet and the Poem.

 

She has taught classes in the Maryland Poetry-in-the-Schools program, at the Writers Center in Bethesda MD, the Chautauqua Institute in Chautauqua NY, the University of Arizona Poetry Center and the Johns Hopkins Graduate Writing Program in Washington, DC. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Julia Nunnally Duncan is an award-winning North Carolina author, whose publication credits include nine books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry and scores of stories, essays, and poems in literary journals and anthologies. Her credits and biography have been listed in Literary Trails of the North Carolina Mountains (UNC Press), she has been reviewed and interviewed in Southern Literary Review, and featured in North Carolina Literary Review. Additional reviews of her work have appeared in Our State Magazine, Asheville Citizen-Times, Appalachian Heritage, and many other newspapers and journals.

Julia’s literary works often explore life in a Western North Carolina textile mill town and confront issues of poverty, unemployment, and alcohol abuse.

Educated at Warren Wilson College, from which she holds a BA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing, Julia has taught English and Southern Culture for over thirty years at her local community college. Recently retiring as a full-time instructor, she continues to teach part-time.

Julia lives in Marion, NC, a town thirty miles east of Asheville, with her husband Steve, a wood carver, and their daughter Annie, a college sophomore. Julia is currently working on a second essay collection and a fifth poetry collection.

Aliki Barnstone is a poet, translator, critic, and editor. Her books of poems are Wild With It (2002), a National Books Critics Circle Notable Book, Madly in Love (1997), Windows in Providence (1981), and The Real Tin Flower (which was introduced by Anne Sexton and was published in 1968, when she was twelve years old). She edited A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now (1980; second edition, 1992), The Calvinist Roots of the Modern Era (1997), The Shambhala Anthology of Women’s Spiritual Poetry (1999; 2003), and she introduced and wrote the readers’ notes for H.D.’s Trilogy (1997). She has recorded a collaborative CD with musician Frank Haney. Her translation of C.P. Cavafy’s collected poems and a study of the development of Emily Dickinson’s poetry are forthcoming.

The daughter of poet, Willis Barnstone, and painter, Elli Tzalopoulou-Barnstone, Aliki was raised with her two brothers, Robert and Tony, in Bloomington, Indiana and Brandon, Vermont; the family traveled widely, especially to Greece, the country of her mother. Barnstone has also traveled to Spain, Holland, Italy, Portugal, England, Turkey, Mexico, Guatemala, Hong Kong, China, Tibet, Nepal, and Burma.

Ron Rash is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Finalist and New York Times bestselling novel Serena, in addition to five other novels, including One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, The World Made Straight, and Above the Waterfall; five collections of poems; and six collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award, and most recently, Something Rich and Strange. Twice the recipient of the O. Henry Prize, he teaches at Western Carolina University.