Country rock musician Steve Earle will display some of his alternate talents — writer, poet, playwright — as the first reader in the spring Writers in the Library series. Earle will entertain us at 7pm on Monday, January 30, 2006, in the Hodges Library auditorium on the University of Tennessee campus. The event is free and open to the public. The UT Libraries’ Writer in Residence, RB Morris, who organizes the Writers in the Library series, is thrilled to bring Steve Earle to campus. “Steve sold out the Tennessee Theater at a pretty steep ticket price last winter playing with his band. Now we have him coming back to town to lay some spoken word on us at Hodges Library auditorium that seats maybe 200 people and is free and open to the public. I just hope the Library’s still there when it’s over,” quipped Morris.

From Steve Earle’s web site:

“For those who don’t know, Steve Earle has been, for the past two decades, one of the more compellingly engaged figures on the American cultural landscape. Steve is the author of best-selling works of fiction (“Doghouse Roses”), a playwright, and a well-known speaker and presence in a variety of left-leaning populist movements. But it is in his persona as an exceedingly thoughtful, yet fun, country rocker that most people know him, and rightly so. His contribution to the merging of progressive country to the wider rock audience remains huge. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that the entire genre of “alt. Country” would not exist without Earle’s ground-breaking extension of what used to be called “folk-rock.” His recorded work, from the classic 1986 Guitartown onward through such excitingly heartfelt/redemptive works as Copperhead Road, I Feel Alright, El Corazon, Transcendental Blues, to the current The Revolution Starts…Now, represents an extraordinary catalogue of deeply personal music which compares favorably with such esteemed heroes as Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, or even Bob Dylan.

“Few artists have been able and/or willing to put themselves so consistently on the line, or to forthrightly speak their minds as Earle has, while continuing to maintain a commercial presence.”

For more details about Writers in the Library, visit www.lib.utk.edu/writersinthelibrary/.

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 974-6905 or deeken@aztec.lib.utk.edu, or R.B. Morris, Jack Reese Writer in Residence, UT Libraries, at 974-3004 or rbmorris@utk.edu.