JOHNSON CITY – Several talented poets are coming to East Tennessee State University in early February as part of the “Three Emerging Writers” series hosted by the Bert C. Bach Written Word Initiative and the Department of Literature and Language.
The event is Wednesday, Feb. 8, on the third floor of the D.P. Culp Student Center. A roundtable discussion runs from 1:40-3 p.m., and a poetry reading and audience question-and-answer session starts at 4 p.m.
“This popular event offers both our students and the community the opportunity to engage with successful writers who are in an early phase of their writing careers,” said Dr. Jesse Graves, professor and poet in residence. “We first offered a ‘3 Emerging Writers’ event in 2012, and the series has featured writers who would go on to achieve great acclaim, like novelists Wiley Cash, Amy Greene and Charles Dodd White and poets Melissa Range and Darius Antwan Stewart.”
The three poets, all from Virginia, are:
- Leah Naomi Green, author of “The More Extravagant Feast” and winner of the 2021 Treehouse Climate Action Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets;
- Lisa J. Parker, author of “This Gone Place” and “The Parting Glass” and winner of the 2021 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize; and
- Valencia Robin, author of “Ridiculous Light” and winner of the Persea Books’ Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize.
Dr. Amy Wright, a former Wayne G. Basler Chair of Excellence for the Integration of the Arts, Rhetoric and Science at ETSU, will also make an appearance celebrating the release of “The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume IX: Virginia.” She and Graves co-edited the work.
“Three Emerging Writers” is sponsored by ETSU’s Bert C. Bach Written Word Initiative and the student-run Creative Writing Society, and supported by the Department of Literature and Language. For more information, call the Department of Literature and Language at (423) 439-4339. For disability accommodations, call the ETSU Office of Disability Services at (423) 439-8346.