Jeff Daniel Marion will be given
the 2006 Career Achievement Award at the annual Knoxville
Writers’ Guild Gala on Thursday, June 8, announced Contest and Awards
Chair Jeannette Brown.
The Gala will be from 6-9 p.m. at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, 2931 Kingston Pike in Knoxville. Tickets are $18 each and can be purchased in advance or at the door. Advance tickets are available either from Guild members or at www.knoxvillewritersguild.org. In addition to honoring Marion, the Guild will recognize the winners of five statewide contests. The Career Achievement Award is selected by the Guild’s Contests and Awards Committee, which in addition to Brown this year included, Judy Loest, Laura Still, Doris Ivie, Julie Auer and Jeanne McDonald.
A native of Rogersville, Tenn., Marion is a much published and honored Appalachian poet who taught English and creative writing at Carson-Newman College until his retirement in 2002. While at CNC he was poet-in-residence, director of the Appalachian Center and editor of Mossy Creek Reader.
His
most recent book, Ebbing & Flowing
Springs: New and Selected Poems and Prose, 1976-2001
(Celtic Cat Publishing, 2002), was winner of the 2004 Independent Publisher
Award in Poetry and was named Appalachian Book of the Year by the Appalachian
Writers Association, as well as being one of three finalists for the
Benjamin Franklin Award that year.
Jackpine Press published the first of Marion’s seven collections of
poetry, Out in the Country, Back Home, in
1976. That was followed by Tight Lines (Iron
Mountain Press, 1981), Vigils: Selected Poems
(Appalachian Consortium Press, 1990), Lost & Found
(Sow’s Ear Press, 1994), The Chinese Poet Awakens
(Wind Publications, 1999) and Letters Home (Sow’s
Ear Press, 2001).
In
addition he has published four poetry chapbooks and in 1992, Orchard
Books published his children’s books, Hello, Crow.
From 1975-80, he edited The Small Farm, a distinguished
regional poetry journal he founded.
Among the more than 75 journals and anthologies that have published
Marion’s poetry are The Southern Review, Atlanta Review,
Carolina Quarterly, Poet Lore, Vanderbilt Poetry Review, Greensboro Review,
Southern Poetry Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Appalachian Heritage,
Appalachian Journal and Epoch.
His fiction has appeared in Now & Then, Appalachian Heritage
and The Journal of Kentucky Studies. His essays
have appeared in CrossRoads, Now & Then, Appalachian
Journal, and Tennessee Country: In the Land
of Their Fathers.
In
1978, Marion received the first Literary Fellowship awarded by the Tennessee
Arts Commission. From 1985-1992 and again in 1994, he served as poet-in-residence
for the Tennessee Governor’s School for the Humanities.
His honors include being featured writer at Emory & Henry College’s
13th Literary Festival in 1994. In 1993 he participated in the Distinguished
Writers Reading Series sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts
and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. He presented the Palmer
Memorial Lecture at Cumberland College in Williamsburg, Ky. in 1996. In
the spring of 1998, he was the Copenhaver Scholar in Residence at Roanoke
College in Salem, Va. In addition to his writing, Marion is a skilled
photographer and print maker. He operates Mill Springs Press in a cabin
on the Holston River near New Market, where he produces chapbooks and
broadsides from handset type on a Vandercook proof press.
North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee have employed him as poet-in-the-schools. In 2002, the Appalachian Writers Association presented him with the Outstanding Contribution to Appalachian Literature Award and in 2005 Carson-Newman College gave him the Education Service to Appalachia Award.
Marion has two children: Rachel and Stephen. Rachel and her husband, Stuart Franklin, live in Rogersville with their two daughters: Allison, 10, and Jenna, 5. Stephen, who is a journalist and novelist, lives in Dandridge with his wife, Eugenia. Marion and his wife, poet and editor Linda Parsons Marion, live in North Knoxville.