Avid readers and music lovers alike will enjoy the first evening of WRITERS IN THE LIBRARY on the University of Tennessee campus. The fall series of writers reading from their works opens with a reading and musical performance by Jim Clark.

Jim Clark — poet/author, musician, songwriter extraordinaire — will read and perform Monday, September 12, at 7 p.m. in the UT Hodges Library auditorium, joined by Katy Adams and Terry Phillips. Clark uniquely blends the spoken word of poetry with old-time strings and balladeering, recently releasing the poetry of Byron Herbert Reece set to his original music.

Clark has published two books of poems, Dancing on Canaan’s Ruins and Handiwork; written a play, The Girl with the Faraway Eye; edited Fable in the Blood: The Selected Poems of Byron Herbert Reece; and served as an editor of such literary journals as The Denver Quarterly, The Greensboro Review, and The Vanderbilt Poetry Review. His most recent book is Notions: A Jim Clark Miscellany.

He has recorded CDs of both poetry and folk-rock music (with his band The Near Myths). The Service of Song (2010), featuring Clark’s musical settings of poems by north Georgia “farmer-poet” Byron Herbert Reece, is his most recent CD.

Clark is currently the Elizabeth H. Jordan Professor of Southern Literature and Chair of the Department of English and Modern Language at Barton College, in Wilson, North Carolina, where he is Director of The Barton College Creative Writing Symposium and an editor of the literary journal Crucible.

WRITERS IN THE LIBRARY, sponsored by the UT Department of English and the UT Libraries, will offer seven events this fall, including readings by Terrance Hayes, Amy Greene, Blas Falconer, Melissa Range, and Robert Morgan – and Vive la Poésie, an event styled as “French-flavored poetry.” The fall and spring schedules are available at www.lib.utk.edu/writersinthelibrary.

For further information contact Martha Rudolph, Communications Coordinator, UT Libraries (865-974-4273 or mrudolp2@utk.edu), or Jeff Daniel Marion, Writer in Residence, UT Libraries (dannymar@earthlink.net).