Linda Parsons and Austin Kodra will read on Monday, January 30, 2017 on the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, campus as part of the Writers in the Library reading series. The mission of Writers in the Library is to “showcase the work of novelists, poets, and other literary craftsmen.” Some of the best voices on the literary scene today are invited to read.

The reading at 7 p.m. in the Lindsay Young Auditorium of the John C. Hodges Library is free and open to the public; all are encouraged to attend.

The Knoxville News Sentinel describes the poems in Parsons’s collection This Shaky Earth as “weighted with memories both bittersweet and sad. . . . Parsons . . . is a poet firmly and unapologetically attached to her home soil.”

UT professor Marilyn Kallet calls Austin Kodra’s poetry “witty, feeling-full, observant and unaffected. He finds poetry everywhere, at the buffet table, the Dairy Queen, the Southwest thunderstorm.” She is “proud to call him a former student and a UT alum.”

Both poet and playwright, Linda Parsons is an editor at UT Knoxville. She served as poetry editor of Now & Then magazine for many years and has received literary fellowships from the Tennessee Arts Commission, as well as the Associated Writing Programs’ Intro Award and the 2012 George Scarbrough Award in Poetry. Parsons’s poetry has appeared in The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Asheville Poetry Review, and Shenandoah and in numerous anthologies. This Shaky Earth, published by Texas Review Press, is her fourth poetry collection. Her adaptation, Macbeth Is the New Black, co-written with Jayne Morgan, has been produced at Maryville College and at Western Carolina University. Her play Under the Esso Moon was selected for the Tennessee Stage Company’s 2016 New Play Festival and will receive a staged reading in 2017.

Austin Kodra’s debut poetry collection, Visibility at Zero, was published by Iris Press in November 2015. His poetry and fiction have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Harpur Palate, Connotations Press: An Online Artifact, Superstition Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, and elsewhere. Austin received his MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale and his BA in English from UT Knoxville. Currently, he lives in Knoxville, where he works as an academic mentor for student-athletes on the UT campus.

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Writers in the Library is sponsored by the UT Libraries and the Creative Writing Program in association with the John C. Hodges Better English Fund. For more information contact Erin Elizabeth Smith, Jack E. Reese Writer-in-Residence at the UT Libraries, at esmith83@utk.edu.

Visit http://library.utk.edu/writers for a complete schedule of Writers in the Library readings for the 2016-2017 academic year.

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