Don’t miss an exciting and rare event as four talented local writers close out the Writers in the Library season with a special reading event. University of Tennessee Creative Writing professor and poet Marilyn Kallet, professor and head of the Creative Writing Program and fiction writer Michael Knight, Creative Writing professor and poet Arthur Smith, and UT Libraries Writer in Residence Kali Meister will share their works from the Knoxville Writers’ Guild 2008 anthology Outscape: Writings on Fences and Frontiers on Monday, November 3, at 7 p.m. in the Lindsay Young Auditorium of Hodges Library.
Kallet, Knight, and Smith are three highly published local authors and inspirational writing teachers who hold more than 40 years of collective teaching experience.
Marilyn Kallet is the author of 14 books, including Circe, After Hours, (BkMk Press, 2005) and Last Love Poems of Paul Eluard, (Black Widow Press, 2006). Her new book, Packing Light: New and Selected Poems, will be released from Black Widow Press in January. She directed the creative writing program at UT for 17 years and now holds a Lindsay Young Professorship. The Knoxville YWCA named her Outstanding Woman of Achievement in the Arts, and she was inducted into the East Tennessee Literary Hall of Fame in Poetry in 2005. Outscape features two of Kallet’s poems from her recent travels to France.
Michael Knight, director of the Creative Writing Program at UT, recently authored The Holiday Season (Grove, 2007), a novella which focuses on a man sorting through his relationships with his father and brother during the first holiday season of the new millennium. He is also the author of Dogfight & Other Stories (Grove, 2007) and Goodnight, Nobody (Atlantic Monthly, 2003). He received the New Writing Award, Fellowship of Southern Writers in 1999 and the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Special Citation in 1999.
Arthur Smith has written several books of poetry, including The Late World (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2002). His work has been honored with a “Discovery”/The Nation Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and he was selected as the Theodore Morrison Fellow in Poetry for the 1987 Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. His poems have appeared in Chicago Review, Cincinnati Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, and many other publications. Two of Smith’s poems appear in Outscape, “San Fran” and “The Future is already among us.”
Kali Meister, UT Libraries Writer in Residence, has worked in theatre, performance art, and film. While living in Texas, Meister worked as an extra on the films J.F.K., Dazed and Confused, and Boys on the Side. Her poetry has been featured in publications such as Circle Magazine, Pegasus Review, and Phoenix. Meister’s ten-minute drama scene, “Absurd Noir,” appears in Outscape.
Outscape features the works of 101 writers in the genres of poetry, short stories, humor writing, and more. The Knoxville Writers’ Guild serves as a support network for Knoxville-area writers, promoting creativity and outreach through education and public events. Learn more about the guild and Outscape at www.knoxvillewritersguild.org.
The Writers in the Library series is sponsored by the University of Tennessee Libraries and the Creative Writing Program of the UT English Department. For further information, please contact Jo Anne Deeken, head of technical services, UT Libraries, at 974-6913 or jdeeken@utk.edu, or Kali Meister, Jack E. Reese writer in residence, UT Libraries, at meisterkali@gmail.com.