Linda Parsons Marion is poetry editor of Now & Then magazine, published by the Center for Appalachian Studies and Services at East Tennessee State University. She has received two literary fellowships from the Tennessee Arts Commission (1998-99, 1996-97), two ArtReach Grants from the Knoxville Arts Council (2000-01, 1997-98), the Tennessee Writers Alliance award in poetry (2001, 2000, 1996), the Tennessee Poetry Prize (1995), and the Associated Writing Program’s Intro Award (1990), among others. Marion’s first book of poems, Home Fires, was published by Sow’s Ear Press in 1997. Her column “The Writing Well” appeared regularly in New Millennium Writings from 1995–2000. She is co-editor of All Around Us: Poems from the Valley (1996) with fellow Guild member Candance W. Reaves. Also with Reaves, in 1996 she conducted and judged the Libba Moore Gray poetry contest, the Guild’s annual poetry competition. Since 1997, she has conducted the contest with her husband, Jeff Daniel Marion, poet-in-residence and director of the Appalachian Center at Carson-Newman College. Marion’s poetry has appeared in The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Apalachee Quarterly, Wind, Appalachian Heritage, Now & Then, Louisiana Literature, Negatie Capability, Helicon Nine, Appalachian Journal, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, HomeWorks, and Press, among others. Most recently, her poems appeared in the Guild anthology, Breathing the Same Air (2001), and an essay “Rescue from Within” appeared in Sleeping with One Eye Open: Women Writers and the Art of Survival (University of Georgia Press, 1999). She has poems forthcoming in Calyx and Poem. A Guild member since 1994 and board member from 1995-1999, Marion has been an active reader, participant, teacher, and supporter in the Knoxville writing community for twenty years. (Remember the Wrangler readings–another round of beer, cornbread, and soupbeans! The wild and wooly Buttonwood Café? Readings held in the Bijou’s tiny upstairs gallery while the Laurel rebuilt after the fire? The trucks drowning you out as they rumbled by?) She helped develop and produce the Guild’s first brochure and developed the Guild’s Writers Alive! Program in 1997, which was led by Debbie Patton Hollenbeck. The program placed Guild members in the high schools of several area counties to read, discuss writing, and donate the Guild’s anthologies to the libraries and English teachers of each school. Marion has taught poetry in UT’s Community Programs and provided editing services for the theses and dissertations of many a desperate graduate student. Marion received her M.A. and B.A. in English from the University of Tennessee (1991, 1988) and is an editor and policy analyst for the UT internal audit department. She lives happily with her husband and fellow poet, Danny, in North Hills, just across from Patricia Neal’s girlhood home and often writes about her daughters, Elayne and Rachel, to their great embarrassment. These days you can find her out in the yard more often than with pencil and legal pad, working in her new art, her new obsession, and praying for rain like any good gardener. |
