Writers in the Library presents its last reading of the semester featuring Abe Gaustad and Jesse Graves, doctoral students from the Creative Writing program, on Monday, Nov. 29 at 7 p.m. in the Hodges Library Auditorium. The reading is free and open to the public.
Gaustad, a fiction writer, is from Memphis and received his Masters in Fine Arts from the University of Memphis. His stories have been published in Other Voices and Third Coast and have garnered awards from Glimmer Train and Memphis Magazine.
The following is an excerpt from “Hands” published in the In Posse Review:
Too bad it all goes downhill from there, when we’re on the balcony afterwards, breathing in the stench of the city and looking for our names spelled in lights. Too bad her hands become stones, barely able to hold her cognac glass so that she uses both hands and looks like a child who’s stolen some of daddy’s booze. My aunt used to say you could watch someone’s hands and know their soul, their skill and how they would die. This girl will die by some clumsy act with a gun, I predict, after some clumsy act of sex. Possibly on a balcony like the one we spend time on.
Graves, a poet, grew up in East Tennessee, studied English at UT, and received his Masters in Fine Arts in poetry from Cornell University. He teaches writing and literature currently at UT and has previously taught at Cornell and the University of New Orleans. His works have won two Woodruff Awards as well as the Knickerbocker Poetry Prize from UT, and he was nominated for the Emily Clark Distinguished Teaching Award at Cornell. Graves’ poetry has been published recently in Roanoke Review, Southern Poetry Review and in the upcoming Knoxville Bound anthology.
The following excerpt is from “Black Water:”
I once heard someone suggest,
“Habit is the body’s way of remembering.”
No, to create a habit, a blue-print for abuse,
is the only way to forget its source,
to impress upon the body
that a single instance cannot ruin us
if we are able to withstand it over and over again.
The Writers in the Library series is sponsored by the University of Tennessee Libraries and the Creative Writing Program of the UT English Department. For further information, please contact Jo Anne Deeken, Head of Technical Services, UT Libraries, at 974-6905, or R.B. Morris, Writer in Residence, UT Libraries, at 974-3004.