Archives: Authors

Jon Manchip White was a distinguished Welsh-American writer who published over 35 books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry over a long writing career. His works of fiction include both novels, collections of short stories and many scripts for film and television. His non-fiction books include history, biography, archaeology, anthropology, travel and personal essays.

 

After graduating from Cambridge in 1950, Manchip White moved to London and became story editor for the newly established BBC Television Service. During his time at the BBC, he read scripts, made adaptations, and wrote original dramas. From 1952 to 1956, Manchip White served Britain as a Senior Executive officer in the British Foreign Service. He continued to write poetry and novels during his time in public service, and he resigned his job to concentrate full time on his writing as an independent author. From 1956 to 1967 he worked as a screenwriter for movies, including a period employed by Samuel Bronston Productions in Paris, Rome and Madrid, where he spent five years. During this time, he traveled widely around Europe and other parts of the world like South Africa. His travels helped to increase his knowledge and provided him the opportunity to research subjects and places for travel and non-fiction books.

 

In the mid-sixties, Jon Manchip White felt the time had arrived to change his circumstances, to shake up his routine. Ever the wanderer, he decided to go to the United States, a place he had admired since college when he wrote a dissertation on the Pueblo Indians. Around this time, he had met the critic and biographer, Cleanth Brooks, who had been in London as the Cultural Attaché at the American Embassy. Brooks suggested that Manchip White look for a position at an American university, and he wrote him a recommendation. In 1967 Jon accepted a job as the writer-in-residence at the University of Texas at El Paso where he started the creative writing program. He enjoyed and excelled at teaching, and eventually he received a full professorship. Teaching also allowed him more time to focus of his main ambition of being a writer of books. The position at El Paso gave him the opportunity to explore the American Southwest and Mexico. As much as he loved Texas, in 1977, he was offered a position at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville as the Lindsay Young Professor of English, an offer too good to refuse. He was the founder of the creative writing program at the University of Tennessee, and soon grew to love East Tennessee with its beautiful forests and mountains.

 

Jon Manchip White has became an American citizen. He continued to live and write in Knoxville, Tennessee. In 1997, Iris Audio Publications released two audio tapes of the author reading from his book of short stories, Whistling Past the Churchyard: Strange Tales From a Superstitious Welshman. In 1999 Iris Press republished his memoir, The Journeying Boy: Scenes From a Welsh Childhood originally published by Atlantic Monthly Press in 1992. Iris, in 2007, published his new historical novel, Solo Goya: Goya and the Duchess of Alba at Sanlúcar based on episodes in the life of the great Spanish painter, Francisco Goya. This novel, along with his earlier biographies of Diego Velázques and Hernán Cortés, concluded what Jon has called his Spanish Trilogy. In July of 2012 Iris Press published Manchip White’s final book, The Bird With Silver Wings, a collection of stories with musical themes.

 

Jon Manchip White died in Knoxville, Tennessee in July of 1913 at the age of 89.

Meira Rosenberg began Indiana Bamboo while completing her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Manhattanville College, where it grew from her memories and imaginings of the small town where she was raised in Indiana and her early childhood in Ohio. Prior to publication, Indiana Bamboo was the winner of the Tennessee Mountain Writers Excalibur Award, a one-time award for a first-time novelist. The novel was also selected as the New Voices in Children’s Literature: Tassy Walden Awards Middle Grade Honor Book.

She and her husband have three children who are now young adults, but while growing up, they had almost as many pets as Indiana Bamboo does, from dogs, cats, guinea pigs, hamsters, goldfish, and hermit crabs, to the occasional garter snakes who were banished to a terrarium on the front porch. While she spends most of her time writing and as a writing instructor, she is a lawyer and a former Literary Trustee of the Lorraine Hansberry Properties Trust.

When her fourteen-year-old Cockapoo, Oreo, isn’t being too mischievous, Meira writes in the kitchen at home in Connecticut. But when Oreo acts up, she flees to bookstores, libraries, and coffee shops to continue writing while drinking lots of tea and too much hot chocolate.

To learn more about Meira and Indiana Bamboo, visit www.MeiraRosenberg.com.

Wendy Drexler is the author of Western Motel (Turning Point, 2012) and the chapbook Drive-Ins, Gas Stations, the Bright Motels (Pudding House, 2007). Her first children’s book, Buzz, Ruby, and Their City Chicks, coauthored with Joan Fleiss Kaplan, was published by Ziggy Owl Press in 2016. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Blood Orange Review, Ibbetson Street, Nimrod, Off the Coast, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, The Mid-American Review, The Hudson Review, The Worcester Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and other journals; featured on Verse Daily and WBUR’s Cognoscenti; and in the anthologies Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust and Burning Bright: Passager Celebrates 21 Years. She has been both a poetry editor and a cavity-nest monitor for the Massachusetts Audubon Society. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she is a native of Denver, Colorado, and lives in Belmont, Massachusetts, with her husband.

www.wendydrexlerpoetry.com

Al Maginnes was born in Massachusetts and grew up in a number of states, mostly in the southeast. A former recipient of an Artist’s Grant from the North Carolina Arts Council, he has degrees in English and writing from East Carolina University and the University of Arkansas. He is the author of six full length collections, most recently Music From Small Towns (Jacar Press, 2014), winner of the Jacar Press poetry competition, and Inventing Constellations (Cherry Grove Collections, 2012), as well as four chapbooks. He lives with his family in Raleigh, North Carolina and teaches at Wake Technical Community College.

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.