Black Creek Reading Series, Part Two

Part Two of the Black Creek Reading Series will kick off Tuesday, February 22nd in the Black Creek Clubhouse dining room (4700 Cummings Cove Drive, Chattanooga, TN 37419) from 6-8:00 pm. Seven local writers will have ten minutes to share their work in progress (bios below). This is a free, adults-only (16+) event. For more information contact Dana Shavin at [email protected].

The writers:

Kemmer Anderson taught English at McCallie for forty years, during which time he received NEH grants to study John Milton, Galileo, and Thucydides. Published chapbooks include Milton at Monticello: John Milton’s Influence on Thomas Jefferson. He has published poems in the Sewanee Review, Rat’s Ass Review, and Sojourners. He and his wife Martha share a home with two cats and a rotating band of rescue dogs.

 Michael Gray is the grandson of a North Carolina forest ranger and an East Tennessee farmer. Drawing from family stories and personal experience, he became a multi-generational Appalachian storyteller. This led to his long-running public radio show, River City Sessions, which featured a mix of traditional music, storytelling, and poetry. His latest project is a podcast titled “Appalachicana,”which uses a mix of storytelling and music to trace the roots of—you guessed it: storytelling and music—from Appalachia back to Scotland and Ireland.

 Mimi Jones Hedwig moved to Chattanooga from New York eight years ago. She has completed a novel, an excerpt of which she’ll be reading. She also has two other novels in development, as well as a memoir of her four years serving as a volunteer at McKamey Animal Center. Mimi worked as an editor at Viking Press, and at Redbook, Family Circle, and Reader’s Digest magazines. Her articles have appeared in those and other periodicals. She lives in North Chattanooga with her husband, composer Douglas Hedwig, and her muse and constant companion, Ruby the dog.

Dana Shavin’s essays and articles have appeared in Oxford American, The Sun, Psychology Today, Parade.com, Appalachian Review, PBS’s Next Avenue, Writers Digest.com, and others, and she has work forthcoming in Garden and Gun. She has been a columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press for twenty years, and is the author of two books: The Body Tourist, a memoir about the intersection of her anorexia with her mental health career, and Finding the World: Thoughts on Life, Love, Home and Dogs, a collection of her most popular Chattanooga Times Free Press columns. You can find more at Danashavin.com.

 Doug Stein is the Founder of Black Creek Club and a partner in the Black Creek community. He writes poetry for his family and occasionally for his own amusement. He is sharing his poems tonight at the urging of his wife, Krista. He has a degree in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but has spent most of his career either building or fixing things designed by engineers.

Linda Voychehovski has been a therapist at a psychiatric hospital, a Peace Corps volunteer, a fine-art photographer, and a teacher of English as a Second Language at UTC. Her writing explores how we forge an identity in the face of the expectations of our families, partners, and cultures, whether we’re living at home or overseas. She is currently shopping her recent project, The Mango Garden: A Memoir of West Africa, an excerpt of which recently came out in the Winter issue of the literary magazine, Parhelion. She lives on Signal Mountain with her husband and their irrepressible rescue cat.

 Kris Whorton is originally from Boulder, Colorado. She teaches writing at UTC and at the Hamilton and Bradley County Jails. She also teaches teens and adults in the mental health sector. Her poetry has 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.