Sabina Murray will present a reading at UT’s Writers in the Library on Monday, February 6, at 7 p.m., in the Hodges Library auditorium.

Murray is the author of the novels Forgery, A Carnivore’s Inquiry, and Slow Burn and two short story collections, The Caprices (winner of the 2002 PEN/Faulkner award) and Tales of the New World. Tales of the New World, her most recent collection, reimagines moments in the lives of explorers from Australian Aborigines to Aztec kings. She is also a screenwriter and wrote the script for the film The Beautiful Country (2005), which follows the story of Binh, a young Amerasian man who comes to the U.S. from Vietnam in search of the father he never knew.

Murray has had plenty of international experiences to inform her writing, having lived in Australia and the Philippines for most of her childhood and teenage years.

She currently directs, and teaches in, the Creative Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Murray has been a Michener Fellow at UT Austin, a Bunting fellow at Radcliffe, a Guggenheim Fellow, and has received a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant, a University of Massachusetts Research and Creativity Award, and a Fred Brown Award for The Novel from the University of Pittsburgh. The Beautiful Country was nominated for a Golden Bear, and the screenplay was nominated for an Amanda Award and an Independent Spirit Award.

Read a review of Tales of the New World on Chapter 16: a community of Tennessee writers, readers and passersby (brought to you by Humanities Tennessee).

Visit www.sabinamurray.com to read more about her work.

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).

Pamela Schoenewaldt opens the spring Writers in the Library series on January 23 with a reading from her historical novel, When We Were Strangers. The novel follows a young needleworker in the 1880s, forced to leave her mountain village in Southern Italy, who endures a rough passage through American cities to a very different life and work in San Francisco.

The public is invited to the reading at 7:00 pm, Monday, January 23, in UT’s Hodges Library auditorium.

At a question-and-answer session following the reading, the audience can learn about the research process for historical fiction. Dr. Marina Maccari-Clayton of the UT history department will be present to address questions about immigration. Dr. Maccari-Clayton is a specialist on migration history, globalization, and modern Europe.

When We Were Strangers (HarperCollins, 2011), Schoenewaldt’s first novel, is in its fourth printing, with Dutch, Polish and Russian translations in process. When We Were Strangers was a Book of the Month Club and Doubleday alternate, a Barnes & Noble Great New Writers Discovery, and is short-listed for the Langum Prize in American Historical Novel. Schoenewaldt is under contract with HarperCollins for a second novel, also historical fiction on the theme of immigration, set in Naples, Italy and Cleveland from 1906 to 1911, culminating in the 1911 Cleveland Garment Workers Strike.

Schoenewaldt lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she is a writer for FMB Advertising. Previously she taught creative writing at the University of Tennessee and served as Writer in Residence at the UT Libraries from 2001 to 2002. She lived in Naples, Italy from 1990 to 2000, translating and teaching writing at the University of Maryland, European Division.

Her fiction has appeared in Belletrist Review, Bianco su Nero, Carve, Cascando (U.K.), Crescent Review (winning the Chekhov Prize for Short Fiction), Fiction Attic, Iron Horse Literary Review, Mediphors, Knoxville MetroPulse, Mondogreco, New Letters, New Millennium Writing, Literary Lunch, New Letters, Paris Transcontinental, Pinehurst Journal, Potomac Review, Square Lake, The Sun, and Women’s Words. Her one-act play in Italian, “Espresso con Mia Madre,” (Espresso with My Mother) was produced at Teatro Cilea, Naples.

Visit her website at http://pamelaschoenewaldt.com.

Read a review of When We Were Strangers on 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).

Author Robert Morgan will present the final reading of the fall semester at WRITERS IN THE LIBRARY Monday, November 14, at 7 p.m., in UT’s Hodges Library auditorium. The reading is free and open to the public.

Morgan is the author of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Two titles published this year demonstrate the breadth of his talent: Through portraits of influential Americans from Thomas Jefferson to Kit Carson, Lions of the West: Heroes and Villains of the Westward Expansion tells the story of the American conquest of the West. The poems in his new collection, Terroir, explore memory, family narratives, and the natural world. “Readers of Morgan’s fiction will recognize many places, themes, and voices, while fans of his poetry will see a fresh energy in poems drawing on science and folklore, Native American history, and music.”

His acclaimed novel Gap Creek won a Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and was chosen Book of the Year for 2000 by the Appalachian Writers Association. Gap Creek was both a New York Times bestseller and a selection of the Oprah Book Club. Morgan has also proved to be an accomplished biographer. His Boone: A Biography has been praised for stripping away the myth to reveal the complex character of the legendary frontiersman.

Morgan is Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell University and has been visiting writer-in-residence at half a dozen universities. His awards include Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, the James G. Hanes Poetry Prize from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and an Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature. He was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2010.

Read a review of Lions of the West on 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).

Melissa Range will read from her poetry at Writers in the Library, 7 p.m., Monday, November 7, in UT’s Hodges Library auditorium.

Melissa Range’s first book of poems, Horse and Rider, Texas Tech University Press, won the 2010 Walt McDonald First-Book Series Prize in Poetry. She has published in The Georgia Review, The Hudson Review, Image, and The Paris Review and in the anthologies Best Spiritual Writing 2011 and The Southern Poetry Anthology: Contemporary Appalachia. She has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Discovery/The Nation prize, and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is currently pursuing a PhD in English and creative writing at the University of Missouri.

Read her poem “New Heavens, New Earth” on 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 Blas Falconer will read his work at Writers in the Library on Monday, October 24, 7 p.m. at the UT Hodges Library Auditorium. The reading is free and open to the public.

In his latest book of poems, A Question of Gravity and Light, Falconer uses the metaphor of “crossings” to tie together poems in free verse and traditional poetic forms. The jacket notes for A Question of Gravity and Light describe his “delicacy of his touch, never obvious or heavy-handed. As a gay man who embraces his Puerto Rican heritage, Falconer stands at an edge of American society, and there is the tension of borders in his work: borders between peoples and nations as well as the less visible, more porous and deceptive borders between family members and lovers. There is not one point of view in these poems but many.”

Falconer is also the author of a poetry chapbook, The Perfect Hour, and co-editor of two anthologies, Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets and The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity, a forthcoming collection of essays on contemporary Latino poetry. (Read a review of The Other Latin@ on CHAPTER 16: A COMMUNITY OF TENNESSEE WRITERS, READERS & PASSERSBY: www.chapter16.org/content/diversity-within-diversity.

His honors include the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award, the New Delta Review Eyster Prize for Poetry, the Barthelme Fellowship, and a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship.

Falconer is associate professor of Languages and Literature at Austin Peay State University and poetry editor of Zone 3 Press and the literary journal, Zone 3.

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 Amy Greene will read at Writers in the Library on Monday, October 17, at 7 p.m., in the University of Tennessee’s John C. Hodges Library Auditorium. Her debut novel, Bloodroot, a family saga set in the Smoky Mountains, has been called a “spot-on account of a land and its people — with its old-fashioned Scots-Irish dialect and its close-knit communities, its homespun Christianity and its folk remedies.” The story is narrated by different members of the Lamb family and follows the family’s history from the Great Depression to the present, telling a “dark and riveting story of the legacies — of magic and madness, faith and secrets, passion and loss — that haunt one family across the generations.”

Bloodroot has received numerous recognitions, including Booklist‘s Top 10 Debut Novels, the Best Debut Fiction list from Kirkus Reviews, and the Weatherford Award for fiction from the Appalachian Studies Association. Her second novel, Long Man, is forthcoming from Knopf.

Amy Greene was born and raised in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, where she lives with her husband and two children.

Writers in the Library is sponsored by the University of Tennessee Libraries and the Creative Writing Program of the UT Department of English. This reading is also sponsored by UT’s Ready For The World initiative and the UT Commission for Women.

For more information, contact Margaret Lazarus Dean, University of Tennessee Department of English, mdean4@utk.edu.