A sampling of titles in the book includes "Killing Chickens," "Make Love, Not Sausage," "Never Give a Child an Artichoke," "Memory's Table," "Julia Child's Kitchen," "A Month in Provence with the Teenage Blues," "Hunger in the Swamp," "Bulimia," "The Cat-head Biscuit Woman," and "Godfather II, the Italian Scenes." The longest title was "The Fall of Dorothy Speers (Or: Not All Reductions Occur in a Saucepan.") Want to reserve your copies now?

An international flavor (pun intended) is provided by entrees regarding food and/or relatives from Italy, Germany, Greece, and Kazakhstan. After the blind judging, editors were surprised to have chosen entries from New York City, Los Angeles, Sanford, North Carolina, Tucson, Arizona, and other "foreign" locales. Of course, writers from Knoxville and East Tennessee are well represented. One of our prized submissions is a never-before-published prose poem by Knoxville native Nikki Giovanni.

Literary Lunch also features food-related paintings and photographs by Margaret Scanlan, Emily Taylor, Sarah Kendall, and Lindsay Kramer. "Talk Over Coffee," a fabulous painting by Bristol artist Elizabeth Johns, is the cover art. Dozens of Guild members have been instrumental in putting the anthology together. Flossie McNabb is the assistant editor. Judy Loest, Julie Auer, Marybeth Boyanton, Catherine Crawley, Jackie Kittrell, and others have provided varied kinds of assistance. And the guild is grateful to Alcoa and the Arts Fund of the East Tennessee Foundation for providing funding. We hope that, with its strong visuals and sensory evocations, Literary Lunch will whet the appetites of readers everywhere.

(Taken from July 2002 East Tennessee Writer, the Guild's newsletter, volume 10, no. 7.)