Thomas Lynch will read at UT’s Writers in the Library, Monday, February 11th at 7 p.m. in the John C. Hodges Library auditorium. The reading is free and open to the public.

Thomas Lynch is the author of five collections of poems and three books of essays, including Skating with Heather Grace, Still Life in Milford, and The Undertaking. He is also the author of the novella and story collection Apparition & Late Fictions. His most recent book is The Sin-Eater: A Breviary which has been called “powerful, unsettling, and full of grace.”

Lynch’s work has been the subject of two films, including PBS Frontline’s The Undertaking, which won a 2008 Emmy Award. The Undertaking is a chronicle of small-town life and death told through the eyes of a poet who is also an undertaker. It notably won the Heartland Prize for nonfiction, the American Book Award, and was a Finalist for the National Book Award. The Kirkus Review praises its “eloquent, meditative observations on the place of death in small-town life” and the New York Times Book Review says “Lynch shows himself to be a master of the essay form.”

Lynch’s essays, poems and stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Granta, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Paris Review.

He lives in Milford, Michigan, where he has been the funeral director since 1974, and in Moveen, County Clare, Ireland, where he keeps an ancestral cottage.

The author will also hold a Q&A session for all interested students, 3-4 p.m., Monday, February 11, in 1210 McClung Tower.

Writers in the Library is sponsored by the University of Tennessee Libraries and the UT Creative Writing Program in association with the John C. Hodges Better English Fund. For further information contact Marilyn Kallet, Director, UT Creative Writing Program (mkallet@utk.edu), or Christopher Hebert, Writer-in-Residence, UT Libraries (chebert3@utk.edu).

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Adam Ross will read at UT’s Writers in the Library, Monday, January 28th, 7 p.m. in the John C. Hodges Library auditorium. The reading is free and open to the public.

Adam Ross’s debut novel, Mr. Peanut, a 2010 New York Times Notable Book, was also named one of the best books of the year by the New Yorker, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the New Republic, and the Economist. Stephen King said of Mr. Peanut, “The most riveting look at the dark side of marriage since Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? . . . It induced nightmares, at least in this reader. No mean feat.”

Ladies and Gentlemen, Ross’s short story collection, was included in Kirkus Reviews and the San Francisco Chronicle’s Best Books of 2011. The book is described as “a darkly compelling collection of stories about brothers, loners, lovers, and lives full of good intentions, misunderstandings, and obscured motives.”

Adam Ross lives in Nashville with his wife and two daughters. Ross was from 1999 to 2003 a feature writer and special projects editor for the Nashville Scene, the city’s alternative weekly. His column, Mondo Nashville, covered the city’s local oddballs and off-kilter luminaries. His cover stories ranged in subjects from the city’s porn king, Al Woods, to race relations, to interviews with homegrown movie star, Reese Witherspoon. He also wrote extensively on books and film. Ross’s nonfiction has been published in the New York Times Book Review, the Daily Beast, the Wall Street Journal, and the Nashville Scene. His fiction has appeared in the Carolina Quarterly and Five Chapters.

The author will also hold a Q&A session for all interested students, 2-3 p.m., Monday, January 28th, in 1210 McClung Tower.

Writers in the Library is sponsored by the University of Tennessee Libraries and the UT Creative Writing Program in association with the John C. Hodges Better English Fund. For further information contact Marilyn Kallet, Director, UT Creative Writing Program (mkallet@utk.edu), or Christopher Hebert, Writer-in-Residence, UT Libraries (chebert3@utk.edu).

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David Madden will be the featured author at UT’s Writers in the Library on Monday, November 12th, 7 p.m. in the Hodges Library auditorium. The reading is free and open to the public.

A novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, and critic, Madden is a prolific writer in all genres. His novels include Cassandra Singing, Bijou, The Suicide’s Wife, Abducted by Circumstance, and Sharpshooter: A Novel of the Civil War. His latest book, London Bridge in Plague and Fire, brings to life the Old London Bridge, which began construction in 1176 and was eventually dismantled in 1834. In the novel, a young poet who lives on the bridge uses his imagination to resurrect the bridge’s architect and the life of the bridge itself, which was one of the wonders of the world.

Madden has compiled and edited numerous collections of stories and is the author of academic volumes on James M. Cain, James Agee, and Carson McCullers. His stories have been reprinted in college textbooks and twice in Best American Short Stories. His best-known novel, The Suicide’s Wife, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and made into a CBS movie. He may also be familiar to students of creative writing for his Pocketful series on fiction, poetry, drama, and essays.

David Madden is a Knoxville native and a graduate of the University of Tennessee. He earned an M.A. at San Francisco State and attended Yale Drama School on a John Golden Fellowship. Writer-in-residence at Louisiana State University from 1968 to 1992, Director of the Creative Writing Program 1992-1994, Founding Director of the United States Civil War Center 1992-1999, he is now LSU Robert Penn Warren Professor of Creative Writing, Emeritus.

The author will also hold an informal Q&A session for all interested students, 3-4 p.m., Monday, November 12th, in 115 Humanities and Social Sciences Building.

Read a review of London Bridge in Plague and Fire 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, Knoxville Libraries and the UT Creative Writing Program in association with the John C. Hodges Better English Fund. For further information contact Marilyn Kallet, Director, UT Creative Writing Program (mkallet@utk.edu), or Christopher Hebert, Writer-in-Residence, UT Libraries (chebert3@utk.edu).

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Internationally acclaimed poet Adam Zagajewski will read at UT’s Writers in the Library on Wednesday, October 31, at 7 p.m. in the Hodges Library auditorium. The event is free and open to the public.

Adam Zagajewski is widely considered to be one of the leading poets of Europe. Born in 1945 in Lvov, he was a major figure of the Polish New Wave literary movement of the early 1970s and of the anti-Communist Solidarity movement of the 1980s. Zagajewski is himself a survivor of history’s nightmares, and following the tragedy of 9/11, one of his poems, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” published in a special edition of The New Yorker, became a touchstone for our traumatized nation.

His books of poetry in English include Without End: New and Selected Poems, Unseen Hand, and most recently, Eternal Enemies. In 2004 he was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and in 2010 he was a nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

He lives in Krakow, Paris, and Chicago.

The author will also participate in an informal chat with students, 2-3 p.m., in 1210-1211 McClung Tower.

Writers in the Library is sponsored by the University of Tennessee, Knoxville Libraries and the UT Creative Writing Program in association with the John C. Hodges Better English Fund. For further information contact Marilyn Kallet, Director, UT Creative Writing Program (mkallet@utk.edu), or Christopher Hebert, Writer-in-Residence, UT Libraries (chebert3@utk.edu).

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Adam Johnson, author of the acclaimed new novel The Orphan Master’s Son, will read at UT’s Writers in the Library, 7 p.m., Monday, October 29, in the John C. Hodges Library auditorium. The reading is free and open to the public.

Dystopian views of the future dominate Johnson’s short stories and his first novel, Parasites Like Us. In The Orphan Master’s Son Johnson portrays the very real, nightmarish kingdom of present-day North Korea. Through the narration of Jun Do (John Doe?) and the ubiquitous loudspeakers constantly blaring propaganda, the reader is immersed in a totalitarian culture in which the state directs the very thoughts of its citizens.

Adam Johnson on The Orphan Master’s Son and his trip to North Korea:

“…[W]hen Kim Jong Il comes to power, all is strength, happiness and prosperity. It didn’t matter that the story was a complete fiction — every citizen was forced to become a character whose motivations, desires and fears were dictated by this script. The labor camps were filled with those who hadn’t played their parts, who’d spoken of deprivation instead of plenitude and the purest democracy.…Traveling to North Korea filled me with a sense that every person there, from the lowliest laborer to military leaders, had to surrender a rich private life in order to enact one pre-written by the Party. To capture this on the page, I created characters across all levels of society, from the orphan soldier to the Party leaders. And since Kim Jong Il had written the script for all of North Korea, my novel didn’t make sense without writing his role as well.” [from an amazon.com interview]

Johnson teaches creative writing at Stanford University. He received a Whiting Writers’ Award for emerging writers in 2009 and was named Debut Writer of the Year in 2002 by amazon.com. His fiction has appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, Playboy, Paris Review, Tin House and Best American Short Stories. Johnson is the author of Emporium, a short-story collection, and the novel Parasites Like Us, which won a California Book Award. His books have been translated into French, Dutch, Japanese, Catalan, German, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, Polish, Portuguese and Serbian.

Johnson is one of the founders of Stanford’s Graphic Novel Project, which each year brings together a team of student writers and artists to create graphic novels that draw on real-world situations, often involving society’s dispossessed. GNP’s projects have featured stories of human-rights abuses, touching on issues such as rape as a weapon of war, child soldiers, and human trafficking. (Read more about comics produced by the Stanford Graphic Novel Project in The Comics Journal.)

Writers in the Library is sponsored by the University of Tennessee, Knoxville Libraries and the UT Creative Writing Program in association with the John C. Hodges Better English Fund. For further information contact Marilyn Kallet, Director, UT Creative Writing Program (mkallet@utk.edu), or Christopher Hebert, Writer-in-Residence, UT Libraries (chebert3@utk.edu).

Novelist Natalie Bakopoulos will be the featured author at Writers in the Library on Monday, October 15, at 7 p.m. in UT’s Hodges Library Auditorium. The reading is free and open to the public.

The Green Shore, published in 2012 by Simon & Schuster, is Bakopoulos’ first published novel. The narrative paints a finely etched portrait of one family set against the backdrop of the late 1960s Greek military dictatorship. The Green Shore has received glowing reviews: “Bakopoulos’s juxtaposition of a historic conflict with the joys and trials of motherhood, the heedlessness of youth, and the durability of family ties is poignant and effective,” says Publishers Weekly; “an astute accounting of the way political climates shift inner lives,” according to Time Out Chicago.

Bakopoulos holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Michigan, where she now teaches. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Ninth Letter, and Granta Online and has received an O. Henry Award, a Hopwood Award, and a Platsis Prize for Work in the Greek Legacy. She is a contributing editor for the online journal Fiction Writers Review. Each summer she teaches creative writing at the Aegean Arts Circle in Andros, Greece.

Writers in the Library is sponsored by the UT Libraries and the UT Creative Writing Program in association with the John C. Hodges Better English Fund. Natalie Bakopoulos’ reading received additional support from UT’s Ready For The World Initiative.

For further information contact Marilyn Kallet, Director, UT Creative Writing Program (mkallet@utk.edu), or Christopher Hebert, Writer-in-Residence, UT Libraries (chebert3@utk.edu).

Award-winning poet Alice Friman will be on the University of Tennessee, Knoxville campus on Monday, October 8. She will read at Writers in the Library, 7 p.m., in the Hodges Library Auditorium. A reception will follow the reading. Earlier in the day, 3-4 p.m., she will hold an Author Chat in 1210-1211 McClung Tower.

Alice Friman’s new book of poems, Vinculum, was released in March 2011 by LSU Press. Friman is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently The Book of the Rotten Daughter and Zoo, winner of the Ezra Pound Poetry Award from Truman State University and the Sheila Margaret Motton Prize from the New England Poetry Club. Her poems appear in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Boulevard, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, and Shenandoah, which awarded Friman the James Boatwright III Prize for Poetry in 2001.

Friman has received fellowships from the Indiana Arts Commission, the Arts Council of Indianapolis, MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Bernheim Foundation. Among her prizes are a 2012 Pushcart Prize, the 2012 Georgia Author of the Year Award for Poetry, and three prizes from the Poetry Society of America.

Anthologized widely and published in thirteen countries, she was Professor of English and creative writing at the University of Indianapolis from 1973 to 1993 and is now Poet-in-Residence at Georgia College & State University. Her new poetry podcast series is Ask Alice.

Writers in the Library events are free and open to the public.

Writers in the Library is sponsored by the University of Tennessee, Knoxville Libraries and the UT Creative Writing Program in association with the John C. Hodges Better English Fund. For further information contact Marilyn Kallet, Director, UT Creative Writing Program (mkallet@utk.edu), or Christopher Hebert, Writer-in-Residence, UT Libraries (chebert3@utk.edu).

UT’s Writers in the Library begins the fall semester with a flourish! Bobbie Ann Mason will lead off the visiting writers series with a reading on Wednesday, September 12, at 7:30 p.m. in the John C. Hodges Library auditorium on the University of Tennessee, Knoxville campus. The event is free and open to the public.

Bobbie Ann Mason is the author of five short story collections, five novels, a memoir, and three works of nonfiction. Her first book of fiction, Shiloh & Other Stories (1982), won the PEN/ Hemingway Award and was nominated for the American Book Award, the PEN/ Faulkner Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her memoir, Clear Springs, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Mason has also received an Arts and Letters Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The New York Times has praised Mason’s books for having “delineated a New South reeling from the dislocations of contemporary life” and for her “radar-sharp knowledge of her characters’ inner lives, [and] her interest in the longings for emotional connection.”

Mason’s most recent book, the novel The Girl in the Blue Beret, was one of last summer’s three “hot literary books” recommended by USA Today.

Writers in the Library is sponsored by the University of Tennessee, Knoxville Libraries and the UT Creative Writing Program in association with the John C. Hodges Better English Fund. For further information contact Marilyn Kallet, Director, UT Creative Writing Program (mkallet@utk.edu), or Christopher Hebert, Writer-in-Residence, UT Libraries (chebert3@utk.edu).