The final Writers in the Library event of the academic year will feature readings by student winners of the John C. Hodges Graduate Writing Prizes. Readings from the winning works will take place in the John C. Hodges Library auditorium on Monday, April 16, at 7:00 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

Prizes are made possible by the English Department through the John C. Hodges Better English Fund, endowed by the same long-time UT English professor for whom UT’s main library is named. This year’s judges were humanities librarian Christopher Caldwell (Poetry) and award-winning novelist Jeanne McDonald (Fiction).

2012 winners of the John C. Hodges Graduate Writing Prizes:

FICTION
First prize: Adam Prince, for “Bruises and Baby Teeth”
Second prize: Tawnysha Greene, “A House Made of Stars”
Third prize: Michael Levan, for “Stara Baba”

POETRY
First prize: Michael Levan, for “I Lose More Each Day I Spend in This Town”
Second prize: Joshua Robbins, “Ars Poetica”
Third prize: Darren Jackson, “We Are Late to Love”
Honorable Mention: Anna Laura Reeve, “Another One of My Poems Bears”

Both first-place winners are already published and well-regarded authors.

Adam Prince’s first collection of stories, The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men, will be published in May 2012 with Black Lawrence Press. Stories from the collection have appeared in The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, and Narrative Magazine among others. Prince will receive his doctoral degree at the end of this school year and then serve as the 2012-2013 Tickner Fellow at the Gilman School in Baltimore.

Michael Levan earned his MA from the University of North Texas and MFA in poetry from Western Michigan University. In May, he will receive his PhD in English and Creative Writing from UT. His work can be found in recent or forthcoming issues of Mid-American Review, Fifth Wednesday, Southern Indiana Review, New South, Harpur Palate, and Third Coast.

The public is invited to join the university community for readings by these accomplished, up-and-coming writers.

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).

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).