The Beat

Anna Laure Reeve was born and raised in Knoxville, and she earned a Master of Arts in Literature & Poetry Writing from the University of Tennessee. Her poems have appeared in Terrain.org, Jet Fuel Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and many others. She recently won Beloit Poetry Journal’s Adrienne Rich Award, and she was a finalist for the Heartwood Poetry Prize and the Ron Rash Award in Poetry...

Pauletta Hansel is the author of nine collections of poetry, including her latest book Heartbreak Tree . Her work has been featured in Oxford American, Rattle, American Life in Poetry, and Poetry Daily, among others. Hansel was Cincinnati’s first Poet Laureate, and she was the 2022 Writer-in-Residence for The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County.  Edna St. Vincent Millay was born...

Gary Metras is a retired high school English teacher and college writing instructor. His poems have appeared in  America, The Common, Poetry,  and many others. Metras has published eight books, including his latest called  Vanishing Points . His book  Marble Dust  is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press. Metras was the founder, editor, and letterpress printer of Adast...

Sara Moore Wagner is the winner of the 2021 Cider Press Review Editors Prize for her book Swan Wife and the 2020 Driftwood Press Manuscript Prize for Hillbilly Madonna. She has published two chapbooks, Tumbling After (Red Bird Chapbooks) and Hooked Through (Five Oaks Press). She won the 2022 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, a 2019 Sustainable Arts Foundation award, and she was a 2021...

Derek N. Otsuji is the author of the book The Kitchen of Small Hours, which won the Crab Orchard Review Poetry Series Open Competition. He was also awarded the 2019 Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. His poems have appeared in The Southern Poetry Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Threepenny Review, The Bennington Review, Harpur Palate, Missouri Review Online,...

Recorded live, April 10, 2023 . In celebration of National Poetry Month, Maurice Manning joined us for Lawson McGhee Library's monthly book discussion group, All Over the Page. Hear Manning read his poems and talk about his book Bucolics. Manning also discusses more recent work including his new podcast, The Grinnin' Possum. Maurice Manning has published seven books of poetry. His first book,...

In this episode, Lyn Hejinian reads four untitled poems from The Book of A Thousand Eyes . Lyn Hejinian is a poet, translator, editor, and scholar whose literary career has been long associated with Language writing. Hejinian is the author of over twenty-five volumes of poetry and critical prose, the most recent of which are  Tribunal  (Omnidawn Books, 2019),  Po...

Jim Minick is the author of two books of poetry,  Her Secret Song  and  Burning Heaven.  In addition, he’s published:  Finding a Clear Path,  a collection of essays;  The Blueberry Years: A Memoir of Farm and Family,  which won the Southern Independent Booksellers Association’s award for nonfiction ;  and  Fire Is...

Monica Mody was born in Ranchi, India. She holds a PhD in East-West Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks, including Ordinary Annals, and two full-length books, Kala Pani, a cross-genre work, and Bright Parallel, which is forthcoming from Copper Coin. Her writing has...

Erin Elizabeth Smith is the Executive Director for Sundress Publications and the Sundress Academy for the Arts. Her third full-length poetry collection, Down, was released in 2020 by Stephen F. Austin State University Press. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Guernica, Ecotone, Mid-American, Tupelo Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, and Willow Springs, among others. She earned he...

Bernard Clay was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and he spent most of his childhood and high school years there. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Kentucky, and he is a member of the Affrilachian Poets collective. His work has been published in Appalachian Heritage, The Limestone Review, Blackbone: 25 Years of the Affrilachian Poets, and various other journals and anthologie...

Just in time for Halloween! GennaRose Nethercott reads two spooky entries from the imagined bestiary 50 Beasts to Break Your Heart. GennaRose Nethercott is a writer and folklorist. Her work has appeared in The American Scholar, Bomb Magazine, Pank, The Literary Review, and others. Her first book, The Lumberjack’s Dove, was selected by Louise Glück as a winner of the National Poetry Series, and her...

Juan R. Palomo is the author of Al Norte (Alabrava Press 2021). Born in Grafton, North Dakota to migrant-worker parents, Palomo grew up in South Texas and several midwestern states. He received a bachelor’s degree in art education from Texas State University and a master’s in journalism and public affairs from American University. He was a reporter, columnist, and editorial writer for The Houston...

Andrea Carter Brown was born in Paterson, New Jersey. Her poems have appeared in T he Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Mississippi Review, and many others. She is the author of September 12, which recently won the 2022 IPPY Silver Medal in Poetry from the Independent Publishers Group. Her other titles include the The Disheveled Bed, Domestic Karma, and Brook & Rai...

Linda Parsons holds a BA and an MA in English from the University of Tennessee. She's the poetry editor for Madville Publishing and the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. Parsons has published poems in The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, The Chattahoochee Review, Southern Poetry Review, Baltimore Review, and Shenandoah, among others. Her fi...

Matthew Wimberley grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains. He’s the author of Daniel Boone's Window and All the Great Territories. Wimberley has won the Crab Orchard Poetry Series First Book Award, the Weatherford Award, the William Matthews Prize, and his work was chosen for the 2016 Best New Poets Anthology. He's an Assistant Professor of English at Lees-McRae College in Banner Elk, North Carolina....

Amelia Martens is the author of four chapbooks and the full-length collection The Spoons in the Grass are There to Dig a Moat . Her work has appeared in The Indianapolis Review, Cream City Review, Diode, Southern Humanities Review, Plume, Southern Indiana Review, and many others. She serves as the Associate Literary Editor for Exit 7: A Journal of Literature and Art and she co-curates the Rivertow...

Ashley M. Jones is Alabama's first African American Poet Laureate, and she's also the youngest. Her books are Magic City Gospel, dark // thing, and REPARATIONS NOW! She teaches creative writing at the Alabama School of Fine Arts and also at the Low Residency MFA program at Converse University. Phillis Wheatley Peters was abducted in West Africa and brought to Boston where she was sold as a slave w...

Joyelle McSweeney is the author of ten books of poetry, stories, novels, essays, translations, and plays. She has won The Pushcart Prize, The Fence Modern Poets Series Award, and The Leslie Scalapino Prize for Innovative Women Performance Artists. With Carmen Maria Machado, she was the guest editor of Best American Experimental Writing 2020 . With Johannes Göransson, she co-edits the international...

Janet McAdams is the author of the novel  Red Weather  and the poetry collections  Feral and  The Island of Lost Luggage , which won an American Book Award. Her chapbook of prose poems  Seven Boxes for the Country After  won the Wick Chapbook competition and was published in 2016. She teaches at Kenyon College, where she is the...

Jesse Graves is a Professor of English and Poet-in-Residence at East Tennessee State University. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Southern Poetry Review, and other literary magazines and anthologies. He has published four books of poetry and his book Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place is forthcoming from Mercer University Press in 2022. Graves received his Ph...

Bruce Alford’s work has appeared in the  African American Review, Imagination & Place Press, The Comstock Review,  and elsewhere. He teaches poetry at Louisiana State University. Before working in academia, he was an inner-city missionary and journalist. Links: Read "from Alford's Devotional" Bruce Alford’s website Poems at  SickLit   “Perfect”&nbsp...

Robert Penn Warren is primarily known as the author of the great American novel All the King’s Men, but he’s also a well-respected poet, and was the USA’s first Poet Laureate. He grew up in Guthrie, KY, and then crossed the state line to go to high school in Clarksville, TN. In 1921, he began his studies at Vanderbilt University and joined a group of poets who called themselves...

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 c...

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...