Anwar F. Accawi, author of The Boy from the Tower of the Moon (Beacon Press, 1999) has published essays in The Sun, the Sewanee Review, DoubleTake, Now and Then, Mizna, the Best American Essays (1998), and Harper's.

He has been an ESL teacher for 37 years in the USA and abroad and now is on staff at the UT's English Language Institute. Anwar's areas of expertise include writing, Middle Eastern history, culture and politics as well as Islamic thought and religion.

Categories: Nonfiction, Memoirs, Poetry, Story Telling, Middle East

E-mail: aaccawi@utk.edu

Carole Borges, author of Disciplining the Devils Country has published poems in Poetry, Kalliope, Crosscurrents. Her non-fiction credits include Rudder Magazine, Vegetarian Digest and Review, and Horsemans Journal. A series of her non-fiction essays was featured in the North Shore Sunday magazine. As a freelance journalist, her work has been seen in the Lynn Item, the Dorchester Community News, the West Side Gazette, and the Enlightener newspaper in Knoxville.

Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Carole was also the recipient of Massachusetts Artists Foundation award. Her unique Writing Your Family Memories and Elements of Fiction workshops have been presented in a variety of settings. She has been a presenter at the East Coast Writing Conference and the Florida Scholastic Press Associations Workshop for High School Seniors. Carole is currently available as a reader, speaker or workshop leader. She has experience working with small and large groups and writers at all levels.

Categories: Poetry, Fiction, Nonfiction, Writing for Young People, Teaching Writing, K-12 School Programs, Memoirs & Journaling, Journalism, The Writing Process, Publishing & Marketing.

E-mail: caroleann1@yahoo.com

    Brian Griffin is a fiction writer, poet and essayist whose work has been widely published in journals such as Shenandoah, Mississippi Review, New Delta Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review, New Millenium Writings, and many others. He received the Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction for his book Sparkman in the Sky and Other Stories, a collection of short fiction which the New York Times Book Review called "beyond promising." A former Writer in Residence at the University of Tennessee Libraries, he has taught literature and creative writing at U.T., Pellissippi State, Webb Middle School, and the University of Virginia. He has also taught at U.T.'s Young Writers' Institute. He holds an M.F.A in Creative Writing from UVA and is co-founder and current director of The Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel, a national competition co-sponsored by the Knoxville Writers' Guild and the University of Tennessee Press.

Brian Griffin says, "In addition to reading and discussing my own fiction or my own poetry in front of adults, I am always happy to teach creative writing to children of any age. I can conduct workshops for K-12 teachers and am experienced at hosting poetry readings or "slams" for Middle School and High School youth."

Categories: Poetry, Fiction, Writing for Young People, Teaching Writing, The Writing Process, K-12 School Programs.

E-mail: taylorprize@yahoo.com

Jim Johnston is interested in and has spoken on Exile: Poems of an Irish Immigrant, his first collection of poems, self-published in 1997. The collection explores the reasons for leaving Ireland in 1974 and his experience of leaving home. Jim is an accomplished reader of the works of other Irish poets and has spoken about writing to both high school and junior college creative writing classes.

He is the owner of Celtic Cat Publishing, a small independent Knoxville publishing company. "I have spoken on various aspects of publishing, particularly self-publishing. Celtic Cat Publishing was founded in 1995 and has published nine books including works by Jeff Daniel Marion, Marilyn Kallet, Arthur Stewart, Frank Jamison and Angie Vicars."

"With over 44 million U.S. residents tracing their ancestry back to Ireland, I am periodically asked to speak on various aspects of Irish history and culture. I have spoken on Northern Ireland, particularly on the period known as the Troubles; on the development of modern Ireland; and on Saint Patrick."

Categories: Poetry, Publishing, Ireland.

E-mail: celtic01@comcast.net

Marilyn Kallet is the author of 12 books, including Circe, After Hours and The Art of College Teaching: 28 Takes, co-edited with April Morgan, UT Press, both in 2005.

Kallet is the poetry editor for New Millennium Writings and is a professor in the English Department of UT, where she has taught for 25 years.

The Knoxville YWCA named her Outstanding Woman in the Arts in 2002, and she was inducted into the East Tennessee Literary Hall of Fame in Poetry in 2005. Dr. Kallet received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in Rutgers, and the Diplome Superieure from the Sorbonne.

Categories: Poetry, Songwriting & Performance Art, K-12 School Programs.

E-mail: kallet@utk.edu

Kali Meister has worked for two decades as an actress, performer, and writer. Her most recent contribution to Knoxville theater community include five different productions of Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues and a multitude of benefit productions for local charities including Michael Karnes, T-Cells and Sympathy for AIDS Response Knoxville and Exonerated for Amnesty International.

She performed her play Exposed, a non-fiction journey through her life chronicling her survival through childhood incest, her rape in her early adulthood, and violence, struggles with food addiction, and negative body image for the Knoxville Writers Guild in March of 2006. Exposed won the 2006 Margaret Atley Woodruff Award for Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee. The play will be one of the featured plays for The Actors Co-op's Fringe Festival.

Kali was the recipient of the 2005 and 2006 Margaret Atley Woodruff Award for Creative Writing, the 2005 and 2006 Eleanor Burke Award for non-fiction, and received second place in the Bain-Swigget Award for form poetry in 2006. She has publications in The New Millennium Review, Pegasus Review, Prism, Knoxville Writers' Guild's Body Anthology: Low Explosions, Phoenix, and Circle Magazine.

Categories: Poetry, Non-fiction, Memoirs & Journaling, Humor, Songwriting & Performance Art, Playwriting, The Writing Process, and Writing as a Form of Recovery.

E-mail: meisterkali@gmail.com

Art Stewart is an ecologist, poet and science educator with more than 60 articles in technical journals, two highly regarded books of essays and poems (Rough Ascension and Other Poems of Science and Bushido: The Virtues of Rei and Makoto) as well as individual essays and poems published in various literary journals.

He was an invited speaker at Clarion Universitys Spoken Art Reading Series, and has given poetry readings to various local civic groups. Art Stewart is a Tennessee Poetry Prize winner, has taught at the university and high school levels, and has been described as a good hearted provocateur within the culture of science.

Categories: Poetry readings, Technical writing, The poetry of science, The science of poetry, and The analysis of Ceriodaphnia toxicity test results.

 E-mail: zcatfish12@charter.net

Don Williams is a prize-winning columnist for The Knoxville News-Sentinel, as well as a freelance journalist, short story writer and the founding editor and publisher of New Millennium Writings, an annual anthology of fiction, nonfiction and poetry.

His awards include a National Endowment for the Humanities Michigan Journalism Fellowship, a Golden Presscard Award and the Malcolm Law Journalism Prize.

Williams is finishing a novel, Oracle of the Orchid Lounge set in his native Tennessee. His book of journalism, Heroes, Sheroes and Zeroes is on sale now.

Categories: Fiction, Poetry, Nonfiction, Memoirs & Journaling, Publishing & Marketing, Regional, Grammar for Grownups, Journalism.

E-mail: donwilliams7@charter.net

Or visit the NMW website at www.mach2.com

Marianne Worthington is on the faculty at University of the Cumberlands and the Kentucky Governors School for the Arts. Her poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Kalliope, The Louisville Review, Kaleidoscope, Natural Bridge, Wind, and other literary magazines. Her recently published poetry chapbook is entitled Larger Bodies Than Mine. She won the Sue Ellen Hudson Excellence In Writing Award in 2003 and was a 2005 finalist in the Sue Saniel Elkind Poetry Contest. Mariannes reviews, essays, and other non-fiction have appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Appalachian Journal, Journal of Appalachian Studies, Mossy Creek Reader, and Journal of Kentucky Studies, Louisville Magazine, Now & Then, and Arts Across Kentucky, Wind. Her prose and poetry are widely anthologized.

She has presented workshops and lectures for the Knoxville Writers Guild, Alabama Writers Conclave, New Opportunity School for Women, Montessori Schools in Knoxville, Kentucky Governors School for the Arts, Laurel County (KY) Public Library, Bellarmine University, Lincoln Memorial University, and Eastern Kentucky University. In Kentucky, she lives with her husband and two fabulously lazy dogs.

Categories: Poetry, Nonfiction, Journalism, Regional, K-12 School Programs.

E-mail: marianneworthington@hotmail.com

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