The romance of celebrity and the comforts of home reign at the UT Libraries this Valentine’s Eve with a night of poetry at Writers in the Library. Poets Joseph Campana and Jesse Graves will read from their works on Monday, February 13th at 7 PM in the Lindsay Young Auditorium of Hodges Library. All Writers in the Library events are free and open to the public.

Joseph Campana grew up in the foothills of the Adirondack mountains. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Beloit Poetry Journal, New England Review, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, and Colorado Review and are forthcoming in Triquarterly, Prairie Schooner and Michigan Quarterly Review. His first collection, The Book of Faces, is a poetic iconography of Audrey Hepburn published by Graywolf Press (2005). Campana currently teaches Renaissance literature and creative writing at Kenyon College in Gambier, OH.

Where are you tonight, Audrey Hepburn?
The stalls are empty, the boys are gone.
No one kneels at the feet of beauty.
A limp film slickens in the wind:
flaps on a wheel of fire.

–from the poem “Final Cut” by Joseph Campana

Jesse Graves was born and raised in Sharps Chapel, Tennessee, a farming community north of Knoxville, which has been the subject of much of his work and study. Jesse is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at the University of Tennessee, where he won the 2004 John C. Hodges Graduate Poetry Award and the 2005 James Agee Conference Award in Poetry. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Cornell University, and has taught literature and writing at Cornell, University of New Orleans, and U.T. His poems are forthcoming in New Millennium Writings and Crossroads: A Southern Culture Annual.

The dead move through us at their will, their voices chime just out of our hearing.
How else do we feel our names when no one speaks them?
How else do we still catch the echo of footprints decades after running through the grass?

Alone in the field, and never alone. Quiet and not quiet.
Home and away.

–from the poem, “Tennessee Landscape, with Blighted Pine” by Jesse Graves

For more details about Writers in the Library, visit their Web site.

All Writers in the Library events are held on Mondays at 7 PM in the Lindsay Young Auditorium of the John C. Hodges Library on the UT Campus. Other Writers in the Library events for Spring 2006 include Marianne Worthington and Charles Morris on March 13, John Wranovics on April 17 and student winners from the UT Creative Writing Program on April 24.

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.