Jesse Graves and Don Johnson will read their poetry at Writers in the Library on Monday, April 2, at 7 p.m. in UT’s Hodges Library auditorium.

Jesse Graves’ new collection of poems, Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine, won the 2012 Weatherford Award for Poetry from the Appalachian Studies Association. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Connecticut Review, The Texas Review and Still: The Journal, among other periodicals. He was co-editor of The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume III: Contemporary Appalachian Poetry (2011) and editor of the forthcoming Robert Morgan Companion. His creative dissertation earned him a PhD in English from UT Knoxville. He teaches in the department of literature and language at East Tennessee State University.

Don Johnson is a professor of English and poet-in-residence at East Tennessee State University. For sixteen years he served as general editor of Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature. Johnson is the author of The Sporting Muse (2004) and three books of poetry, The Importance of Visible Scars (1984), Watauga Drawdown (1991), and Here and Gone: New and Selected Poems (2008). He also edited Hummers, Knucklers, and Slow Curves, a collection of modern and contemporary American poems about baseball (1992).

Writers in the Library is sponsored by the University of Tennessee Libraries and the UT Department of English. For further information contact Marilyn Kallet, Director, UT Creative Writing Program (mkallet@utk.edu), or Jeff Daniel Marion, Writer in Residence, UT Libraries (dannymar@earthlink.net).

Authors Edward Francisco and Linda Parsons Marion will read at the March 12 Writers in the Library, 7 p.m. in UT’s Hodges Library auditorium.

Edward Francisco is a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and scholar. He is the author of two novels, Till Shadows Flee and The Dealmaker. His poetry collections include (Lie)fe Boat (winner of the 1995 Bluestone Press award); Death, Child, and Love (2000); The Alchemy of Words (one of Small Press Review’s Top Picks for 2007); and Hunting Keats (volume forthcoming from Birch Brook Press). Francisco was also principal editor of The South in Perspective, an anthology of Southern literature published by Prentice-Hall.

He is Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at Pellissippi State College in Knoxville, where he was recently voted Student Choice Teacher of the Year for the seventh time.

Linda Parsons Marion is the author of three poetry collections, Home Fires (1997), Mother Land (2008), and Bound (2011). Her latest book, Bound, chronicles the work and fabric of five generations of a Tennessee family (Read more in the August 2011 Knoxville News Sentinel). She recently returned to her earliest literary enthusiasm, playwriting. In August 2011, the Knox County Public Library hosted a table reading of a new play, Decoration Day, featuring a plot that centers around a family cemetery (See the August 3, 2011 Metro Pulse story).

She has published in Shenandoah and Prairie Schooner among many other magazines, and is an editor at the University of Tennessee. She has twice won the Tennessee Arts Commission Literary Fellowship in Poetry and has received multiple other awards. For many years she served as poetry editor for Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine.

Writers in the Library is sponsored by the University of Tennessee Libraries and the UT Department of English. For further information contact Marilyn Kallet, Director, UT Creative Writing Program (mkallet@utk.edu), or Jeff Daniel Marion, Writer in Residence, UT Libraries (dannymar@earthlink.net).

Novelist Christopher Hebert will read at UT’s Writers in the Library on Monday, March 5, at 7 p.m. in the Hodges Library Auditorium.

Christopher Hebert is the author of The Boiling Season (HarperCollins, 2012). The novel is set on an unnamed Caribbean island engulfed in political turmoil. The narrator escapes to a remote and idyllic mountain estate only to be overtaken by the unrest that rocks his country.

The story was inspired by an article on Haiti. Although Hebert had some international experience (having lived and taught in Mexico), he waited until after finishing the novel to visit Haiti. (Read more in the Knoxville News Sentinel.)

Hebert graduated from Antioch College, where he also worked at The Antioch Review. He earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan and was awarded UM’s prestigious Hopwood Award for Fiction.

His nonfiction has appeared in Interview Magazine and The Millions. The Boiling Season is his first novel.

Hebert teaches in UT’s Creative Writing Program. He lives in Knoxville with his son and his wife, the novelist Margaret Lazarus Dean.

Writers in the Library is sponsored by the University of Tennessee Libraries and the UT Department of English. For further information contact Marilyn Kallet, Director, UT Creative Writing Program (mkallet@utk.edu), or Jeff Daniel Marion, Writer in Residence, UT Libraries (dannymar@earthlink.net).

Novelist Josh Weil will read at UT’s Writers in the Library, Monday, February 27, 7:00 p.m., in the Hodges Library Auditorium.

Josh Weil was born in the Appalachian Mountains of rural Virginia to which he returned to write the novellas in his first book, The New Valley.

A New York Times Editors Choice, The New Valley won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from The American Academy of Arts and Letters; the New Writers Award from the GLCA; a “5 Under 35″ Award from the National Book Foundation; and was shortlisted for the Library of Virginia’s literary award in fiction. Weil’s other fiction has appeared in such publications as Granta, One Story and Agni, and he has written non-fiction for The New York Times, Oxford American, and Poets & Writers. The recipient of fellowships and awards from the Fulbright Foundation, the Dana Foundation, the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, the James Merrill House, and the MacDowell Colony, he has taught at Bowling Green State University as the Distinguished Visiting Writer and been the Tickner Writer-in-Residence at Gilman School.

Currently living and teaching in Oxford, MS, as the University of Mississippi’s John & Rene Grisham Emerging Southern Writer, he is at work on a novel.

Read an interview with Josh Weil at Chapter 16: a community of Tennessee writers, readers and passersby (brought to you by Humanities Tennessee).

Writers in the Library is sponsored by the University of Tennessee Libraries and the UT Department of English. For further information contact Marilyn Kallet, Director, UT Creative Writing Program (mkallet@utk.edu), or Jeff Daniel Marion, Writer in Residence, UT Libraries (dannymar@earthlink.net).

Poet Jeff Daniel Marion will read at UT’s Writers in the Library on Monday, February 20, 7:00 p.m. in the Hodges Library Auditorium.

Marion has published eight poetry collections, four poetry chapbooks and a children’s book. Ebbing & Flowing Springs: New and Selected Poems and Prose, 1976-2001 was named Appalachian Book of the Year by the Appalachian Writers Association. His latest collection, Father, was awarded the 2009 Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize. In 2011 he received the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South from the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Marion founded The Small Farm, one of the region’s most distinguished poetry journals, which he edited from 1975 to 1980. For twenty years he operated Mill Springs Press, producing chapbooks and broadsides from handset type on a Vandercook proof press.

From 1969 until his retirement in 2002, Marion taught creative writing at Carson-Newman College, where he was poet-in-residence, director of the Appalachian Center, and editor of the Mossy Creek Reader. He is the current Jack E. Reese Writer-in-Residence at the University of Tennessee Libraries.

Writers in the Library is sponsored by the University of Tennessee Libraries and the UT Department of English. For further information contact Marilyn Kallet, Director, UT Creative Writing Program (mkallet@utk.edu), or Jeff Daniel Marion, Writer in Residence, UT Libraries (dannymar@earthlink.net).

Poet and fiction writer Jason Schossler will perform at UT’s Writers in the Library on Monday, February 13, at 7 p.m. in the John C. Hodges Library auditorium.

Jason Schossler’s first book of poetry, Mud Cakes, won the inaugural Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Prize from Bona Fide Books in 2010. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, he is also the winner of the 2009 Edwin Markham Poetry Prize and the 2010 Emerging Writer award from Grist: A Journal for Writers.

His poems and stories have appeared, among other places, in The Sun, North American Review, Rattle, Poet Lore, The South Carolina Review, Roanoke Review, and The Antioch Review. He has been awarded four fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, as well as fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation and Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus in Germany.

Schossler teaches writing at Temple University and also works as a freelance legal journalist for Thomson Reuters.

Writers in the Library is sponsored by the University of Tennessee Libraries and the UT Department of English. For further information contact Marilyn Kallet, Director, UT Creative Writing Program (mkallet@utk.edu), or Jeff Daniel Marion, Writer in Residence, UT Libraries (dannymar@earthlink.net).