Come to the meetings! 2005

Each meeting involves a brief summary of KWG activities followed by a program that includes noted individuals, both local and national, from the writing and publishing fields. Speakers and programs include:

December: Christmas pot luck dinner, reading, and book sale.

November: Poet X.J. Kennedy will read from his latest work of poetry. In addition to his many works for children, Kennedy has published more than ten collections of verse and two novels over the past two decades. For more information, visit http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/634

Election of new members for the Board of Directors will take place at the November 3 meeting. You can see the list of candidates here.

October: Three young fiction writers will talk about their experiences as first-book
authors at the October meeting of the Knoxville Writer’s Guild.
The UT Creative Writing Program and the Guild are jointly hosting three
first-book fiction writers: Cathy Day, author of The Circus in Winter, Lynn
Pruett, author of Ruby River, and Geoff Schmidt, author of Write Your Heart
Out: Advice from the Moon Wynx Hotel.

Organized by Allen Wier, professor of creative writing at UT and a member
of the Guild, the three will talk about their experiences with agents,
editors and publishing after getting degrees in creative writing.

September: Julia Lieber will read from her latest mystery novel (published in June 2005). The Blue Scorpion (Alyson) is her follow-up novel to There Came Two Angels, released last year. Lieber is the mystery pen name of Guild member and former president Julie Auer.

August:    Open mic. Guild members are welcome to read from their fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. 5 minutes maximum. Sign up at the meeting.

July:   A smorgasbord of teachers from the Knoxville Writers' Guild Summer Workshops will give a preview of their courses at the July 7 meeting.  

June:  The June KWG Program will feature winners of the Hodges awards:
Jessica Weintraub, Brad Tice, and Casie Fedukovich, graduate students
in UT's Creative Writing Program and winners of the John C. Hodges Graduate Writing Prizes this year.

Casie Fedukovich, a Master's student in the Creative Writing program at UT with a BA in English Writing and Journalism from Concord College in Athens, West Virginia, has been published in Fledgling and E2K: A Literary Paradigm.

Bradford Tice recently received his MA in poetry from the University of Colorado, and is now at work on his Ph.D. at UT. His poetry and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in such periodicals as North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Nimrod, Poet Lore,
Mississippi Review, Crab Orchard Review, and the anthology This New Breed: Gents, Bad Boys, and Barbarians 2 (Windstorm Creative).

Jessica Weintraub, a third year English Ph D. student at UT, received her MA in
English/Creative Writing at UC Davis, and has published poems in Poetry Scotland, in*tense, Spark, and New Millenium Writings. Her story, "The Ice Cream Wars" was the second place winner in The Improper Bostonian's annual fiction contest.

 May:  Don Williams, Knoxville New-Sentinel columnist, editor of New Millennium Writings and a Knoxville freelance journalist, will read from his newly published book:  Heroes, Sheroes and Zeroes: The Best Writings About People.  Included in the book are accounts of famous and infamous people:  Elvis, Jim Bakker, Joan Baez, Michael Jordan, and more.  Most of the pieces are columns collected from the Knoxville News-Sentinel over the years. Especially memorable is Williams' account of Knoxville writer Libba Moore Gray's heroic battle with cancer.

April:  Marilyn Kallet will read from her newest book of poems, Circe: After Hours,  published by BKMK Press, University of Missouri. Kallet is the "author of ten other books. Her poems have appeared in hundreds of publications, including New Letters, Prairie Schooner, and Tar River Poetry. Kallet has won the Tennessee Arts Commission Literary Fellowship in Poetry and was named Outstanding Woman in the Arts by the Knoxville YWCA. She is the poetry editor for New Millennium Writings and holds the Hodges Chair for Distinguished Teaching at the University of Tennessee, where she directed the creative writing program for seventeen years." --BKMK Press  

 March:  Marie Howe, author of What the Living Do, will read from her latest works of poetry.  Howe will be at the University of Tennessee for a three-day visit as writer-in-residence.  Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Agni, Harvard Review, and New England Review, among others. Howe's first book, The Good Thief was selected for the 1987 National Poetry Series. Howe teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. Read excerpts.

 February: Catherine Landis will read from her second novel Harvest published by St. Martins Press in October 2004. Landis wrote short stories, "mostly unsuccessfully" in her words, although one of them won the Leslie Garrett Award from the Writer's Guild.  Landis says, "Finally I got the gumption to start a novel -- this was around 1995 -- and that novel was Some Days There's Pie, which was published in May, 2002."  

January: Happy New Year!  Winners of the Fifth Annual Robert Burns Poetry Award/ Terry Semple Memorial Contest will read their work on Thursday, January 6 at the Knoxville Writers Guild monthly meeting in the Laurel Theater.
 
 Archive of program speakers, 1998 to present