Come to the meetings! 2007

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: Holiday Potluck and readings from The Christmas Book.

November: Louisville, KY poet and founder of the InKy Reading Series, Erin Keane is the author of The Gravity Soundtrack, a full-length collection of poems forthcoming from WordFarm in 2007, and The One-Hit Wonders (Snark Publishing), a chapbook of poems about and inspired by rock & roll.

Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in or are forthcoming in many magazines, including Nimrod, Phoebe, Spoon River Poetry Review, Sou'wester, Poems & Plays, New Southerner, Now & Then and Louisville Magazine. A recipient of a fellowship from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and the Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council, she directs the InKY Reading Series in Louisville, Ky. Keane also writes a blog for Velocity and serves on the editorial boards of New Southerner and The Heartland Review.

October: Jimmy Carl Harris, award-winning short fiction writer and Birmingham, Alabama native, will provide the program at the Knoxville Writers’ Guild meeting at 7 p.m., Thursday, February 1, 2007. Harris, a retired Marine and university professor, will read from his new collection Walking Wounded: Stories (Iris Press, 2006) and will speak about how his writing is guided by the premise, “There are good stories. There are safe stories. There are no good safe stories.” Originally, this presentation was scheduled for February 1 but was postponed due to inclement weather.

September: Kevin Brockmeier was recently named one of Granta magazine's Best Young American Novelists. His most recent novel is The Brief History of the Dead, 2006. A native of Florida who lives in Little Rock, Ark., Brockmeier's other novels are The Truth About Celia, City of Names, Grooves and story collections Things That Fall From the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer.

August: Nashville poet and teacher Bill Brown.

July: members' open mic night.

June: Recipient of an O.Henry Prize and an Italo Calvino Award, Neela Vaswani is the author of Where the Long Grass Bends, a collection of short fiction published by Sarabande Books. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, American Literary Review, Epoch and the Cimarron Review, among other publications. Her work often explores themes of cultural negotiation, storytelling, social responsibility and draws upon her Indian and Irish heritage. The San Francisco Chronicle writes, "Vaswani's unflinching eye shows the reader the beauty grounded in the mundane."

May: Knoxville News-Sentinel columnist Robert Booker is a freelance writer and former executive director of the Beck Cultural Exchange Center. Booker currently writes a weekly column for the Knoxville News Sentinel and serves as acting public relations director for Knoxville College. He graduated from the historical black college in 1962 with a double major in English and French. Booker has published three books: Two Hundred Years of Black Culture in Knoxville, Tennessee, 1791-1991; And There Was Light! The 120 Year History of Knoxville College 1875-1995; and The Heat of a Red Summer. He has recently completed his fourth book, From the Bottom Up, which is not yet published.

A Knoxville native, Booker served in the U.S. Army in France and England as an Information and Education Specialist. He taught French at Howard High School in Chattanooga for two years. When he returned to Knoxville, he became the first black ever elected to the State Legislature from Knox County where he served three terms. He also was administrative assistant to the Mayor of Knoxville for seven years.

April: Born and raised in the mountains of North Carolina where his family has
lived for over 200 years, Ron Rash was educated at Gardner-Webb College and
Clemson University. Co-winner of the 2003 AWA Book of the Year Award for his novel, One Foot in Eden, Rash’s novel also won ForeWord Magazine’s Gold Medal for Best
Literary Novel of 2002. He was the featured author at the 2003 Emory &
Henry Literary Festival and the 2003 Palmer Lecturer at Cumberland
College. Winner of a General Electric Young Writers Award, a National
Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, the Sherwood Anderson
Prize, an O. Henry Prize, and the James Still Award from the Fellowship
of Southern Writers, Rash is published in over 80 journals.

He has also published three collections of poetry (Eureka Mill, Among
the Believers, and Raising the Dead) and two collections of short
stories (The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth and Casualties). His
second novel, Saints at the River, was published in 2004 and won the
2005 Southeast Booksellers Association Fiction Award and 2004
Weatherford Award for best novel. His third novel, The World Made
Straight, was published in 2006.

March: East Tennessee oral historian DruAnna Overbay, author of Windows of the Past: The Cultural Heritage of Vardy.

February: Jimmy Carl Harris, award-winning short fiction writer and Birmingham, Alabama native, will provide the program at the Knoxville Writers’ Guild meeting at 7 p.m., Thursday, February 1, 2007. Harris, a retired Marine and university professor, will read from his new collection Walking Wounded: Stories (Iris Press, 2006) and will speak about how his writing is guided by the premise, “There are good stories. There are safe stories. There are no good safe stories.”

January:  Silas House, writer-in-residence at Lincoln Memorial University, will provide the
program at the Knoxville Writers’ Guild meeting at 7 p.m., Thursday, January 4, 2007.
The award-winning novelist will read from his fiction and speak about how his work as a
music journalist and features writer informs his fiction writing. House is the author of three best-selling novels, published by Algonquin Books. Clay’s Quilt won the Bronze Book of the Year award from ForeWord Magazine. His second novel, A Parchment of Leaves, won the Award for Special Achievement from the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the Chaffin Award. The Coal Tattoo was selected as the Kentucky Novel of the Year and won the Appalachian Book of the Year Award. His forthcoming novel, Eli the Good, will be published in 2008 by Algonquin Books. A play, The Hurting Part, was produced by University of Kentucky Theatre Department in 2005. House is also a member of the musical duo The Doolittles. Their first CD, Pine to Pine, was released in 2006 on Little Betty Records. Their next release is scheduled for 2007.

 
 Archive of program speakers, 1998 to present