Written Word initiative to host ‘Three Emerging Writers’

JOHNSON CITY (Feb. 20, 2020) – “Three Emerging Writers” – poets J. Scott Brownlee, Kristin Robertson and Matthew Wimberley – will visit East Tennessee State University on Monday, March 2, to work with university students and to give a free public poetry reading.

The reading will begin at 4 p.m. in the Reece Museum.  Each writer will present a 20- to 30-minute reading, and the public will have the opportunity to interact with each poet during a Q&A and book-signing. 

The “Three Emerging Writers” series is a popular and well-attended program featuring public poetry and fiction readings and class visits by successful authors who are in the early stages of their careers.  Since the first “Three Emerging Writers” event in 2011, a variety of acclaimed writers have been featured guests, including Wiley Cash, Amy Greene and Elizabethton native Melissa Range. 

“These events are student-focused, with multiple opportunities provided for ETSU undergraduate and graduate students to engage with accomplished writers,” said Dr. Jesse Graves, associate professor of English and poet in residence in ETSU’s Department of Literature and Language.  “The program is a boon to our thriving minor in creative writing, and all ETSU students and the community are invited to attend and benefit from the event.”

Brownlee is the author of the award-winning chapbooks (small books of ballads, poems, tales or tracts) “Highway or Belief,” “Ascension” and “On the Occasion of the Last Old Camp Meeting in Llano County.”  His first full-length collection, “Requiem for Used Ignition Cap,” was selected by C. Dale Young as the winner of the 2015 Orison Poetry Prize.  He currently lives in Austin, Texas; teaches for Brooklyn Poets as a core faculty member; and is a former Writers in the Public Schools Fellow at New York University, where he earned his M.F.A.

Robertson was raised in East Tennessee and is the author of “Surgical Wing,” a collection of poetry selected as the Editor’s Choice winner for the Alice James Award.  Her new poems appear in Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Threepenny Review, Kenyon Review and Five Points.  She is assistant professor and director of the creative writing program at Tennessee Wesleyan University.

Wimberley grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains and is the author of two collections of poetry, “All the Great Territories” and the forthcoming “Daniel Boone’s Window,” which was selected by Dave Smith for the Southern Messenger Poetry Series.  Wimberley’s work has most recently appeared as part of the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day series.  He lives on Beech Mountain in North Carolina and is an assistant professor of English at Lees-McRae College.

“Three Emerging Writers” is sponsored by the Department of Literature and Language and supported by the Bert C. Bach Written Word Initiative.

For more information, contact Graves at 423-439-6674 or gravesj@etsu.edu.  For disability accommodations, call the ETSU Office of Disability Services at 423-439-8346.