The Meacham Writers’ Workshop will take place Oct. 27-29 at Chattanooga State on Thursday and UTC on Friday and Saturday. This year two of the featured writers are Gerald Stern, National Book Award Winner in Poetry, and James Tate, National Book Award Winner and Pulitzer prize Winner in Poetry.

Other writers include multiple prize winning authors Sebastian Matthews from North Carolina, Dara Wier form University of Massachusetts, Ann Marie Macari from Philadelphia, Evie Schockley from Rutgers University, and Cherie Priest. A number of local writers also participate including Meacham Director Richard Jackson, winner of numerous International Awards, and UTC Professor Earl Braggs who has won national awards for his poetry and his fiction. Published local authors such as Rebecca Cook, Barry Graham, Laura Howard, Helga Kidder and others will also participate.

This year the program will also include a special workshop session for over 50 area high school students on Saturday morning, Oct. 29.

Anyone interested in having a manuscript discussed should send three collated copies of three poems or 12 pages of prose to the English department by Oct. 17.

The Meacham Workshops are free: everyone is welcome to attend and there is no formal registration. Jean Meacham, a former UTC professor widely regarded as one of the University’s finest teachers, gave a generous endowment to UTC in memory of her husband, Ellis, a writer and judge. The terms of the bequest, and a tribute to Jean’s extraordinary vision, stipulate that the workshops be free and open to the public with no formal registration. She intended the workshops to be a place where professional, student, local, and amateur writers might freely meet, listen to each other, and help each other improve. She also intended the workshops to include readers, not just writers, an audience that could hear first hand some of the best national and international writers.

The Program is sponsored by: The Meacham Fund, Allied Arts of Chattanooga, CSTCC, UTC Speakers and Special Events Committee, UTC English Department, UTC Honors Program, and the Poetry Miscellany.

Schedule of Events
Thursday, Oct. 27
Chattanooga State Center for Advanced Technology, Room C-30 at 7 p.m. Braggs, Matthews, Wier

Friday, Oct. 28
UTC University Center
Morning and Afternoon Informal Discussions/ Interviews
Afternoon Reading: 12 p.m. UC Signal MTN RM: Cook, Schockley, Guest
Evening Reading: 7 p.m. UC Raccoon MTN RM: Jackson, Stern, Tate

Saturday, Oct. 29
UTC University Center
Morning Workshop/Discussions 10-11:30 a.m. University Center
Special High School Workshops 10-11:30 a.m. Holt Hall
(Rooms will be posted in UC)
Afternoon Reading: 1 p.m. UC Raccoon MTN RM: Graham, Macari, Priest
BIOGRAPHIES

Earl Braggs, UC Foundation Professor of English, teaches writing and literature at UTC. He is the author of five collections of poetry, including Crossing Tecumseh Street, House on Fontanka, Walking Back From Woodstock, and Hat Dancer Blue (winner of the 1992 Anhinga Prize). His latest collection, In Which Language Do I Keep Silent: New and Selected Poems, is scheduled for publication in 2006. In addition to many prizes and awards for poetry and fiction, he was recently awarded Individual Artist Grants from Chattanooga Allied Arts and The Tennessee Commission for the Arts.

Rebecca Cook teaches English at UTC. Her chapbook of poems, The Terrible Baby, will be published in 2006 by Dancing Girl Press. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she was awarded a Writer’s Residency at The Dairy Hollow Writers’ Colony in 2005. Her prose and poetry have appeared in many literary journals. New work is scheduled to appear in
Northwest Review, Orchid, Margie, Quarter After Eight, Powhatan Review, and others.

Barry Graham’s five books are widely praised on both sides of the Atlantic. The Times (London) hails Mr. Graham as "a young master," and Details calls him "one of the real literary finds." Booklist says of Before: “unrelenting and brutally honest. . . Graham has a visual style and writerly voice that are all his own: timely, urban, and powerful." Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting, calls The Book of Man "haunting and evocative... resonates with the redemptive power art has over life." Mr. Graham has written for many American and British publications, is the editor of The Bradley News Weekly in Cleveland, Tenn., and is a Zen Buddhist priest and teacher of The Buddha Way Zen Sangha.

Paul Guest has written two books of poems, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World (2002 New Issues Prize in Poetry) and Notes for My Body Double (forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press). Rodney Jones has said “From my first encounter with Paul Guest's poetry, I have thought of him as one of the most brilliant poets in America….He makes no distinction between light and dark subject matter. The accomplishment of his poems translates everything into delight.” His work has appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Verse, The Iowa Review, Slate, Swink, Gulf Coast, and many others.

Richard Jackson, UC Foundation Professor of English directs the Meacham Writers’ Conference, and is the author of nine books of poems, including Half Lives: Petrarchan Poems, Unauthorized Autobiography: New and Selected Poems, Heartwall , and Svetovi Narazen, as well as several chapbooks of translations, and his own work has been translated into over a dozen languages. He has edited two anthologies of Slovene poetry an eastern European chapbook series, two journals, and is the author of a two award winning books of criticism. He has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, Fulbright Fellowship, NEA and NEH Fellowships, five Pushcart Prizes, and other awards including the President of Slovenia’s Order of Freedom Medal for literary and humanitarian work in the Balkans.

Anne Marie Macari’s first book of poems, Ivory Candle, won the APR/Honickman first book prize in 2000. Her poems have been published in many magazines and anthologies such as TriQuarterly, American Poetry review, Bloomsbury Review, Shenandoah, Five Points, and The Iowa Review. She is on the core faculty at New England College Low residency MFA Program and the Prague Summer Workshops. Her second book, Gloryland, has been called by the poet-critic Tony Hoagland, a book “in pursuit of the serious mysteries…a sensational collection.”

Sebastian Matthews is the author of the memoir, In My Father’s Footsteps. He has also co-edited, along with Stanley Plumly, The Poetry Blues: Essays & Interviews of William Matthews and Search Party: Collected Poems of William Matthews, a recent finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His poetry and prose has appeared in, among other places, Atlantic Monthly, New England Review, Post Road, Seneca Review, Tin House and Virginia Quarterly Review. Matthews teaches part-time at Warren Wilson College where he edits Rivendell. Author of one chapbook of poems, his book, We Generous, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press.

Cherie Priest’s southern gothic novel, Four and Twenty Blackbirds (Tor October 2005), has received rave reviews. Publisher’s Weekly says “The classic Southern gothic gets an edgy modern makeover in Priest’s debut novel” and Charles de Lint says “The narrator’s voice is pitch-perfect…I could hear the mosquitoes. Smell the damp forests. Share the same eerie frisson of the narrator.” Her second novel, the sequel Wings to the Kingdom, is slated for publication in 2006. A third book will complete the trilogy in 2007.

Evie Shockley is the author of a chapbook, The Gorgon Goddess (2001), and the forthcoming collection a half-red sea, both with Carolina Wren Press. Her poetry also appears in such publications as African American Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Blue Fifth Review ,Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Ekphrasis, HOW2, Poetry Daily: Poems from the World’s Most Popular Poetry Website, and Role Call. A graduate fellow of Cave Canem, she was awarded a residency at Hedgebrook Retreat for Women Writers in 2003, and is Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University.

Gerald Stern is the recipient of many awards, including the National Book Award for This Time; the Lamont Prize; fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, NEA, American Academy of Poets; and the Ruth Lilly Prize. Widely revered as a master teacher, he has taught at many universities including Columbia, NYU, Iowa, and has been a guest at numerous venues such as the Prague Summer Workshops and New England College’s MFA Program. His memoir, What I Can’t Bear Losing: Notes From a Life, has been widely praised. His American Sonnets reinvented the genre, and his latest book, Everything is Burning, is just out.

James Tate is the author of 14 collections of poetry including the recent Return to the City of White Donkeys. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the William Carlos Williams Award, as well as the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, he has also published a book of short stories, Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee, a book of essays and interviews, The Route as Briefed, from U of Michigan Press, and has been editor of Best American Poetry 1997. Other books of poetry include Memoir of the Hawk, Shroud of the Gnome, and Worshipful Company of Fletchers. His work is the subject of a collection of essays, Under Discussion: On James Tate, from Michigan. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

Dara Wier is the author of nine books of poetry including her recent Reverse Rapture. Earlier collections include the Phi Beta Kappa Award Finalist Voyages in English and Hat on a Pond. She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, Massachusetts Arts Council, and American Poetry Review. She teaches in the MFA program for poets and writers at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Her poems appear in many journals and anthologies including APR, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, Seattle Review and New American Writing.