Poet Singer-Songwriter Tom House to Launch Series on September 25

The University of Tennessee Writers in the Library series has an exciting slate of readers for its Fall 2006 season. The first reading of the season will be held on Monday, September 25 and feature Tom House, a Nashville-based poet and singer-songwriter.

“If there’s a reincarnation of Woody Guthrie’s unique sprit and talents, it’s not Steve Earle, not Springsteen, not Dylan, but Tom House. His abilities and purity are untouched in the wasteland of artists our current culture serves up,” RB Morris, Jack E. Reese Writer in Residence, said.

As a musician, House has received worldwide attention for his unique recordings and performances. His most recent album, The Last Desperate Man, was released in September 2005, called by the Nashville Scene, “a melodicism that drinks as deeply of the plaintive lyricism of Appalachia as of the lilting, brooding folk-blues of East Texas.”

House has also collaborated on a number of musical adaptations of literary works, including an opera based on the first chapter of William Faulkner’s Light in August, song cycles based on Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Connie May Fowler’s Remembering Blue, and the songs for a play based on Lee Smith’s novel, Fair and Tender Ladies.

Tom House will read for Writers in the Library on Monday, September 25 at 7 pm in the Lindsay Young Auditorium of Hodges Library. The event is free and open to the public.

Upcoming Writers in the Library authors include:

Vivian Shipley: October 18
Knoxville Writers Guild: October 23
Yusef Komunyakaa: November 6
Roger Smith: December 4

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 deeken@aztec.lib.utk.edu, or R.B. Morris, Jack Reese Writer in Residence, UT Libraries, at 974-3004 or rbmorris@utk.edu.