Knox Pods

Chris Tonelli is a founding editor of the independent poetry press  Birds, LLC ; co-director of the  NC Book Festival ; and author of five chapbooks and two full-length collections of poetry, most recently  Whatever Stasis  (Barrelhouse Books, 2018) . He works in  the Libraries at NC State  and is the co...

Adelaide Crapsey is best known as the inventor of the American cinquain . She was born in 1878 in Brooklyn, NY, and she grew up in Rochester. In 1903, she began to show symptoms of tuberculosis which would eventually take her life in 1914. In spite of her illness, Crapsey attended the American Academy’s School of Classical Study in Rome, and then eventually returned to the U.S. to teach at Smith C...

Amy Wright is the author of three books of poetry and six chapbooks. Wright’s essays have appeared in  The Georgia Review, Fourth Genre, Ninth Letter, Brevity , and elsewhere. She has been awarded two Peter Taylor Fellowships to the Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop, an Individual Artist Grant from the Tennessee Arts Commission, and a fellowship to Virginia Center for the Creative Art...

Prince Bush is an MFA student at Western Kentucky University. His poems have appeared in many literary magazines, including The Cincinnati Review, Cream City Review, Poet Lore, Pleiades, Puerto del Sol, and others. He was a 2019 Fellow at Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets and an Erastus Milo Cravath Presidential Scholar at Fisk University.  "Lithium" first appeared in Pleiades; "On Truth" f...

David Baker is the author and editor of 18 books, including 12 books of poetry. His most recent book is  Swift: New and Selected Poems , published by W. W. Norton.  Baker teaches at Denison University and he frequently serves on the faculty of the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College. He is the Poetry Editor of  The Kenyon Review....

Tyler Mills’ poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Guardian, The New Republic, and others. She’s published two books and has two chapbooks forthcoming. Mills teaches for Sarah Lawrence College’s Writing Institute and she edits The Account, an online literary magazine. Look for Tyler Mills’ books in our online catalog or call us at the Reference Desk at Lawson McGhee Library....

Cintia Santana’s work has appeared in the Best New Poets 2020  anthology, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review,  and many other literary journals. She was awarded fellowships from CantoMundo, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. She teaches literary translation, as well as poetry and fiction workshops in Spanish, at Stanford University. Lin...

Maurice Manning has published seven books of poetry. His first book,  Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions , won the Yale Younger Poets Award, and his fourth,  The Common Man , was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.  Be sure to look for books by Manning in our online catalog. Links: Read "One View of Time" by Maurice Manning Bio and poems at the Poetry Foundation Article in Ga...

Watch for an upcoming poetry podcast produced by Knox County Public Library. It’s called The Beat. David Orr, a poetry columnist for the New York Times Book Review , describes a common idea that some people have about poetry—that understanding it "is like solving a calculus problem while being zapped with a cattle prod." Or maybe worse, we hear people give (again quoting David Orr) "testimonials a...

Dr. Melanie Mayes shares the alarm and urgency of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells in this episode of Books Sandwiched In. She explains how the author brings stark realities of our future climate into terrifying focus—the fragility of our situation and the myriad ways that our ability to survive is endangered by the climate we are creating. Wallace-Wells is a...

Dr. Mark McGrail discusses Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America by Beth Macy for Books Sandwiched In. Macy reveals the relentless physical, structural and social forces behind the opioid crisis and how to work for the transformational change required to overcome them. Music credit: "Three Stories" by Blue Dot Sessions , CC BY-NC 4.0 8G3ofTPxvoOWfuQYlJpl

In this podcast episode, Dave Wells summarizes the key points in Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt.  Bestselling author Arthur C. Brooks, president of American Enterprise Institute, shows that abuse and outrage are not the right formula for lasting success. Brooks offers a better way to lead based on bridging divides and mending relationships. Wells...

In American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment , Shane Bauer weaves a deep reckoning of his experience as a prison guard together with a thoroughly researched history of for-profit prisons in America. Julie Gautreau, an attorney with the Knox County Public Defenders Community Law Office, adds local context to the issues in this discussion for Books Sandwiched I...

Dr. Maria Fernanda Campa considers the facts revealed in Saudi America: The Truth about Fracking and How It's Changing the World by Bethany McLean. "In addition to easy access to investment capital, the oil and gas industry enjoys the biggest subsidies of any energy sector—yes, more than renewables," Campa said. "Further, the oil and gas industry is exempted from environmental policies, such as th...

Dr. Kelsey Ellis drives home the point of The Cure for Catastrophe: How We Can Stop Manufacturing Natural Disasters by Robert Muir-Wood in her work on individual behavior responses to tornado warnings. In The Cure for Catastrophe , global risk expert Robert Muir-Wood argues that our natural disasters are in fact human ones. Recognizing how disasters are manufactured gives us the power to act. Elli...

Dr. Zach McKenney appreciates Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein, calling it "a harrowing account of the human consequences of plant shutdowns and the rippling effects that they have throughout affected communities." In Janesville, Wisconsin, the nation’s oldest operating General Motors assembly plant shut down in the midst of the Great Recession. With intelligence, sympathy, and insig...

Does every vote count? Attorneys Julie Gautreau and Tammy Kaousias grapple with the implications of data and laws that challenge voter access and representation. This podcast episode is excerpted from their remarks during the Democracy and the Informed Citizen Symposium on September 28, 2018, sponsored by Humanities Tennessee. Gautreau is a lawyer practicing with the Knox County Public Defender's...

Dr. Rocio Huet focuses on what's most important in her assessment of Natural Causes: an epidemic of wellness, the certainty of dying, and killing ourselves to live longer by Barbara Ehrenreich. Ehrenreich describes how we over-prepare and worry too much about what is inevitable. We may buy expensive anti-aging products or cosmetic surgery, get preventive screenings and eat more kale, or throw ours...

Cliff Rodgers, Knox County Administrator of Elections, explains what happened when the county website was attacked during the May 2018 election, and what his employees do to protect the voting machines from tampering. This episode is excerpted from Rodgers' remarks (September 28, 2018) during the Democracy and the Informed Citizen Symposium sponsored by Humanities Tennessee. Music credit: "Three S...

Dr. Nick Geidner discusses Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito and Jeff Howe, who lay out the unprecedented changes in a world that is more complex and volatile today than at any other time in our history. The mind-blowing transformation in our modern existence to faster, cheaper, and smaller—combined with the immediate connectivity of billions of strangers—has created an unpredi...

If you prefer a battle hymn to an elegy, listen to historian Elizabeth Catte provide the context of her book What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia . Catte explains how Appalachia is not what you may have thought it was, and Appalachia's future doesn't have to be one of depopulation and the desperation of those left behind: I left.... moved to wherever the job market decided that I needed to...

Marshall Stair considers zoning and housing policy in his overview of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein. "As the City of Knoxville turns its attention to improving the zoning code, I thought it was important for the community to take an historical look at some of the negative consequences of government regulations, specifically atte...

Presidential historian and Tennessean Jon Meacham discussed his book  The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels with Senator Lamar Alexander on July 8 in an event sponsored by Friends of the Knox County Public Library and Union Ave Books . In The Soul of America , Meacham helps us understand the present moment in American politics by looking back at critical times in our country’s hist...

Dr. Matt Harris discusses A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer and More Efficient Tax System by T. R. Reid. "Just about every economist and political figure in America agrees these days that our tax code has to be reformed," the author says. Believing we have reached a breaking point, Reid travels around the globe visiting countries like Estonia, New Zealand and United Kingdom to inve...

Claudia Caballero, Executive Director of Centro Hispano de East Tennessee , responds to the book The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of An American Life  by Lauren Markham.  Under mortal threat by the MS-13 gang in rural El Salvador after the civil war, identical twins Ernesto and Raul fled for their lives in 2013. They met the author as students at Oakland International High...