Please join us at the Mountain Arts Community Center for a reading by five local authors. Hear personal essays, short stories, and poetry in the beautiful, newly renovated theater. Complementary wine; no charge to attend. Books available for signing, purchase. Come and get lit(terature)!
WHERE: 809 Kentucky Avenue
WHEN: Friday, March 31 at 6:30-8pm
COST: Free, and complementary wine
QUESTIONS: Cheryl Craven at the MACC (423)886-1959 or [email protected]
PARTICIPATING AUTHORS:
Edward Earl Sherman Braggs II is a UC Foundation Professor of English and Battle Professor of African American Studies at the University of TN at Chattanooga. He is the winner of two Student Government Association (SGA) Professor of the Year Awards and a UTNAA Professor of the Year Award. Additionally, Braggs is the author of 14 collections of poetry and the memoir, A Boy Named Boy. Braggs’ prizes include the Anhinga Poetry Prize, Cleveland State (Ohio) Poetry Prize (Unable to accept, the same manuscript won the Anhinga Prize), C&R Press Soup Bowl Poetry Prize, Gloucester Country, MA Poetry Prize, Jack Kerouac International Literary Prize, William Matthew Poetry Prize, Southern Literature Alliance’s 2021 Distinguished Author Award, Arts and Sciences (UTC) Lifetime Research and Creative Achievement Award, James Jones First Novel Prize (finalist), Other Big Book Award for Nonfiction (finalist), Horace J. Trayor Minority Leadership Award, and North Carolina Writer’s Network Competition for Black Writers Award. Braggs was inducted into East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame in 2016. His latest poetry collections are Hat Dancing Blue with Miss Bessie Smith (Yellow Jacket Press, Tampa, FL), Negro Side of the Moon (C&R Press, Greensboro, NC), Cruising Weather Wind Blue (Anhinga Press, Tallahassee, FL) and Obama’s Children (Madville Publishing, Dallas, TX). Yard Sale, Moving to Neptune, New and Selected is forthcoming from Anhinga Press.
Paul Luikart is the author of the short story collections Animal Heart (Hyperborea Publishing, 2016), Brief Instructions (Ghostbird Press, 2017), Metropolia (Ghostbird Press, 2021), and The Museum of Heartache (Pski’s Porch Publishing, 2021.) He serves as an adjunct professor of creative writing at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. He and his family live in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Andrew Najberg is the author of the forthcoming novels Gollitok (Cactus Moon Press, 2023) and The Mobius Door (Wicked House Publications, 2023), as well as the collection of poems The Goats Have Taken Over the Barracks (Finishing Line Press, 2021). His poetry and prose have appeared in dozens of journals online and in print, including North American Review, Cimarron Review, Good River Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Nashville Review, Prose Online, and Utopia Science Fiction. Currently, he teaches at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and is a senior editor for Symposeum Magazine.
Dana Shavin’s essays and articles have appeared in Garden and Gun, Oxford American, The Sun, Today.com, Psychology Today, Bark, PBS, Next Avenue, Fourth Genre, Alaska Quarterly Review, Appalachian Review, storySouth, and others. She is an award-winning columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, and the author of a memoir, The Body Tourist (Little Feather Books, 2014) and Finding the World: Thoughts on Life, Love, Home and Dogs, a collection of her most popular columns spanning twenty years. She has been a panelist and presenter at Keystone College, Chattanooga State, UTC, and the Meacham Writers’ Workshop, and has been a guest speaker for the Eating Disorders Information Network, the Unitarian Universalist Church of Chattanooga, Jewish Family and Career Services in Atlanta, Unity Church, the Chattanooga Jewish Cultural Center, and at various performance venues and fundraisers. More at Danashavin.com.
Kris Whorton is originally from Boulder, Colorado. She teaches creative writing and scientific writing at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga where she served as the assistant director of the Meacham Writers’ Workshop for 4 years. She also teaches teen and adult writing courses in the community and has worked with the incarcerated in Hamilton and Bradley counties. Her first poetry collection, Alchemy, will be released by Finishing Line Press in August 2023. Whorton’s poems have appeared most recently in The Greensboro Review #109 and Salmon Creek Journal. Her fiction has been published in Driftwood Press, Scarlet Leaf Review, and elsewhere; she was a guest editor for Roots Rated, and her creative nonfiction has been anthologized and featured in Get Out.