Bill Brown is the author of twelve poetry collections and a writing textbook, Important Words, on which he collaborated with Malcolm Glass. In 1999 Brown wrote and co-produced the Instructional Television Series, Student Centered Learning, for Nashville Public Television. Brown directed the writing program at Hume-Fogg Academic High School in Nashville for 19 years. His philosophy that those who write live more examined lives fostered a love of words in generations of students. He retired from Hume-Fogg in May 2003 and accepted a part-time lecturer’s position at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. In 1995 the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts named him Distinguished Teacher in the Arts. He has been a Scholar in Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, a Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and a two-time recipient of Individual Artist Fellowships in poetry from the Tennessee Arts Commission. In 2011 the Tennessee Writers Alliance awarded Brown Writer of the Year. He continues to do consultant work and lead writing workshops.
RB Morris, poet, singer, songwriter, musician, and playwright, hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. In the 1980’s he edited an arts and literary tabloid, Hard Knoxville Review, which attracted a cult following in this country and in Europe. He is widely published as a poet. He also wrote a one-man play, The Man Who Lives Here Is Loony (1992), taken from the life and work of writer James Agee, and recently played Agee in productions of the play both at the University of Tennessee and at the Cornelia Street Café in NYC. In recent years Morris has been a celebrated recording artist. His CDs include Local Man, Take That Ride, Knoxville Sessions, Zeke and the Wheel, and Empire.
Linda Parsons coordinates WordStream, WDVX-FM’s weekly reading series, with Stellasue Lee and is the reviews editor at Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel. She has contributed poems to The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Baltimore Review, Shenandoah, among many fine journals and anthologies. Parsons is the copyeditor/proofreader for Chapter 16, Tennessee’s literary website, and also playwright-in-residence for The Hammer Ensemble, the social justice wing of Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville, Tennessee. Candescent is her fifth poetry collection (Iris Press, 2019).
R. T. Smith was born in Washington D.C. and raised in Georgia and North Carolina. He was educated at Georgia Tech, UNC and Appalachian State and taught for nineteen years at Auburn University, where he served as Alumni Writer-in-Residence and co-editor of Southern Humanities Review. Since 1995 he has been the editor of Shenandoah for Washington and Lee University, where he serves as Writer-in-Residence. He has also taught in visiting writer capacity at VMI and Converse College. Smith’s previous collections of fiction are Faith and Uke Rivers Delivers, which was published in LSU’s Yellow Shoe Fiction Series. His stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories, New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. His poetry collections Messenger and Outlaw Style received the Library of Virginia Poetry Award in 2002 and 2008. Smith lives in Rockbridge County, Virginia with his wife, the poet Sarah Kennedy.
Jessie Janeshek’s second full-length book of poems is The Shaky Phase (Stalking Horse Press). Her chapbooks are Spanish Donkey/Pear of Anguish (Grey Book Press), Rah-Rah Nostalgia (dancing girl press), Hardscape (Reality Beach), Supernoir (Grey Book Press), and Auto-Harlow (Shirt Pocket Press). She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and an M.F.A. from Emerson College and is an Associate Professor of English and the Director of Writing at Bethany College.
jessiejaneshek.net
George Scarbrough was born in a clapboard cabin in Patty, Polk County, Tennessee in 1915. He was the third of seven children in a family of sharecroppers which moved frequently around the County during his early years. He was an avid reader from his earliest years, and showed literary inclinations which seemed very strange in the County at the time. George attended the University of Tennessee in 1935-36, The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee for two years on scholarship during the war in 1941-43, and then taught at several schools. He entered Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee and graduated with a B.A. degree cum laude in 1947. He received a Masters degree from The University of Tennessee in Knoxville in 1954, and later attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
He has published poetry in more than 65 magazines and journals over many years continuing into the present, and recently, for example, has been published in Poetry five times in 1997. He has also published five major books of poetry and one novel. George’s first book of poetry, Tellico Blue, was published by E. P. Dutton in New York in 1949. Dutton also published two additional Scarbrough books of poetry: The Course is Upward (1951) and Summer So-Called in 1956. Iris Press published Scarbrough’s New and Selected Poems in 1977, and it was greeted with widespread acclaim. St. Luke’s Press published George’s novel, A Summer Ago in 1986. Iris Press published his most recent book, Invitation to Kim, in 1989, and it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1990.
Karen Carissimo was born in Berkeley, California, and educated at Mills College and The University of Southern California. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including North American Review, Notre Dame Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Western Humanities Review, American Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Puerto del Sol. Her fiction has appeared in Green Mountains Review, and her nonfiction in The San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is currently at work on a novel and a second collection of poems.
Tony Reevy is a graduate of North Carolina State University, UNC-Chapel Hill and Miami University. His previous publications include poetry, non-fiction, essays and short fiction, including the non-fiction books Ghost Train!, O. Winston Link: Life Along the Line, The Railroad Photography of Jack Delano and The Railroad Photography of Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg; the poetry chapbooks Green Cove Stop, Magdalena, Lightning in Wartime and In Mountain Lion Country; and the full books of poetry, Old North, Passage and Socorro. He lives in Durham, North Carolina with wife, Caroline Weaver, and children Lindley and Ian.
Holly Guran, author of the chapbooks River Tracks (Poets Corner Press) and Mothers’ Trails (Noctiluca Press), grew up with a view of the Hudson River which partly accounts for the frequency of rivers and water in this collection. Holly went on to live in a variety of places from Eugene, Oregon to Rome, Italy, eventually landing in Boston where she is retired from a long career at Roxbury Community College. She earned a Massachusetts Cultural Council finalist award (2012), is a member of the Jamaica Pond Poets, and has been a presenter at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. Each summer Holly attends the Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequence where writing workshops host veterans and others. Her publications include Salamander, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Westchester Review, U.S. Worksheets 1, andshe was a featured poet in The Aurorean and Bellowing Ark. Holly lives with her husband, Philip and their dog, Ginger, and enjoys visits with children and grandchildren.
Holly Guran Website
Jacqueline Marcus is the author of Close to the Shore (Michigan State University Press). Her work has appeared in the Antioch Review, Kenyon Review, North American Review, North Dakota Quarterly, New Madrid, Tampa Review, Hotel Amerika, Verse Daily, and other journals. She taught philosophy at Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, California. Marcus’ collection of commentaries, Man Cannot Live on Oil, Alone: Time to end our dependency on oil before it ends us, is available at Kindle Books. She is the editor of the online poetry journals, ForPoetry.com and EnvironmentalPress.com. Her essays have been published at BuzzFlash at Truth-out.org, the North American Review, CommonDreams.org and more.