Two visiting writers and three local writers will present a series of readings and classroom visits at local schools. Besides visiting Baylor and CGLA, they will perform Wednesday at noon at the UTC Honors Reading Room and at Covenant College at 7 p.m. on Friday. Pamela Uschuk and William Pitt Root, as well as Earl Braggs, Richard Jackson and Kris Whorton, will present at each event.
"These award-winning writers create a unique environment by taking away the usual separation of the writer and the audience, and will read a poem at a time each in response to each other and to the audience’s questions and contributions." organizers said.
"The intended effect is to make poetry more accessible rather than the privileged art form it is often taken to be. Designed as a conversation with the audience, this unique approach will elicit questions, poems and comments. The Writing As Conversation Series breaks down the barriers between writer and reader to create a unique experience where your questions and contributions shape the conversation."
The series is sponsored by Double Cola Company, Olsen Law Firm, Rising Dragon, Tech, UTC Honors College, Poetry Miscellany and several former students, including Hunter Hobbs, Daniel Yim, Cody Taylor, Bradley Paul, Karri Harrison, Taylor Loy, Rebecca Shelton, Laura Baird, Danielle Hanson, Laurel Snyder, Charlie Scott and Tatiana and Ata Moharerri.
About the writers:
Pam Uschuk has eight books of poems, including Crazy Love, winner of a 2010 American Book Award and a new collection, Refugee, from Red Hen Press, 2022 (Starred Review). Translated into more than a dozen languages, her work appears worldwide, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Agni Review, etc. Her awards include Best of the Web, the Struga International Poetry Prize (for a theme poem), Dorothy Daniels Writing Award from the National League of American PEN Women, and prizes from Ascent and Amnesty International. Editor-in-chief of Cutthroat, A Journal Of The Arts and Black Earth Institute fellow, Ms. Uschuk lives in Bayfield, Co. and Tucson, Az. She edited the anthologies, Truth To Power: Writers Respond To The Rhetoric Of Hate And Fear, 2017, Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century, 2020 and Through the Ash, New Leaves, 2022. The month of September found her at Storyknife Women Writers Retreat in Alaska on a writing fellowship. She’s finishing work on a multi-genre book called Crazed Aggels Of Hope: An Odyssey Through Ovarian Cancer.
William Pitt Root’s numerous poetry collections include Strange Angels (2013), White Boots: New and Selected Poems of the West (2006), PEN West Poetry Award finalist Trace Elements from a Recurring Kingdom: The First Five Books (1994), and The Storm and Other Poems (1969). Root’s poetry has been featured in several anthologies, including What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (2019), And What Rough Beast: Poems at the End of the Century (1999), and The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology (1988). His honors include the Southern Review’s Guy Owen Prize and three Pushcart Prizes, as well as a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and other fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. The poetry editor for the literary journal Cutthroat, Mr. Root has taught at Hunter College, Michigan State and the University of Montana. He lives with his wife, poet Pamela Uschuk, near Durango, Co.
Richard Jackson is the author of 17 books of poetry, including The Heart as Framed: New and Select Poems, Dispatches, Where The Wind Comes From and Broken Horizons and 12 books of essays, interviews, translations, editions and anthologies. Winner of Guggenheim, Fulbright, NEA. NEH and Witter Bynner Fellowships and the order of Freedom from the President of Slovenia for his literary and humanitarian work during the Balkan wars, he has also edited 32 chapbooks from eastern European poets. His poems have been translated into 17 languages and his books have won the U of Alabama Book Award, Cleveland State Book Prize, U Mass Juniper Prize, Ashland Poetry Press Award, Eric Hofer Award, Maxine Kumin Award and Ben Franklin Award. His poems have appeared in numerous anthologies such as 5 Pushcart appearances, Best American Poems, Best of Georgia Review, Best of Crazy Horse, Prairie Schooner Anthology and others. He has given readings and lectures at dozens of universities and libraries as well as in Slovenia, Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Spain, India, Israel, Hong Kong, Canada, England, Wales, Italy, Poland, Czech Republic, Switzerland, Hungary and Romania. Over 52 of his former UT-Chattanooga undergrads have gone on to publish nearly 130 books. He is distinguished emeritus professor at UTC and founder of the Meacham Writers’ Workshops.
A North Carolina native from the rural-back-woods-fishing community of Hampstead, Earl Sherman Braggs is a UC Foundation and Battle Professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Mr. Braggs is the author of fourteen collections of poetry. Hat Dancing with Miss Bessie Smith, Cruising Weather Blues and Negro Side of the Moon are his latest. Among his many awards are the Anhinga Poetry Prize, the Cleveland (Ohio) State Poetry Prize (unable to accept, manuscript won in two places at the same time), the C&R Poetry Prize, the Jack Kerouac International Literary Prize, the Knoxville News Sentinel Poetry Award and the Gloucester County Poetry Prize. Braggs’ novel, Looking for Jack Kerouac was a finalist for the James Jones First Novel Contest. Boy Named Boy, a Memoir was published by Wet Cement Press. Obama’s Children was published by Madville Press. His Moving to Neptune: New & Selected has just been published by Anhinga Press.
Kris Whorton teaches creative writing, literature, and composition at the University of Tennessee. Additionally, she teaches creative writing at Hamilton County Jail and works with teens, adults and mental health members in the community. Her fiction has been published in Driftwood Press, Scarlet Leaf Review and elsewhere. Her poetry will appear in The Greensboro Review and has appeared in American Muse, Facets-magazine and Pinball Publishing. Her Creative Non-Fiction has been anthologized. A guest editor for Driftwood Press and Indianola Review, she currently reads for Cheap Imitation.