Meacham Writer's Workshop Offers Help To Emerging Local Writers
Local colleges are giving young writers the chance to learn how to write like the professionals with the Meacham Writer’s Workshop.
This event will be taking place over three days and at several different locations. It will consist of readings and free writing workshops for students and local writers by UTC faculty and visiting writers. Events are still being added, but the current schedule is as follows:
Thursday March 19, 2020
7:00 P.M. readings at Chattanooga State, Health Science Center, Room 1087
Earl S. Braggs, Donna Coffey Little, Tom Balàzs, Karen Babine
Friday March 20, 2020
12:00 P.M. readings at UTC, UC Auditorium
Danielle Hanson, Alex Quinlan, Tracye Pool, Catherine Meeks,
Russell Helms, Andrew Najberg
7:00 P.M. readings at UTC, University Center, Raccoon Mountain Room
Rick Jackson, Sybil Baker, Sandy Meek, Tina Mozelle Braziel,
Carrie Meadows
Saturday March 21, 2020
seminar rooms and times TBA
2:00 P.M. readings at UTC, Derthick, room 101 (next to the library)
Katy Yocom, Dana Shavin, Megan Denton Ray, Sarah Einstein,
Kris Whorton
Followed by Q&A with the visiting writers
Meacham Writer’s Workshop is a biannual conference and writing workshop created by the late Jean Meacham in honor of her husband, Ellis K. Meacham. It is made possible by a collaboration between several local art groups and a partnership with UTC and Chattanooga State. Along with free writing workshops, it also features readings from both UTC faculty and visiting writers.
This year six visiting writers will be joining the event:
-Tina Mozelle Braziel, the author of Known by Salt (Anhinga Press) and Rooted by Thirst (Porkbelly Press), has been awarded the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, an Alabama State Council on the Arts fellowship, an Eco Fellowship with the Magic City Poetry Festival, and an artist residency at Hot Springs National Park. She earned her MFA at the University of Oregon. She directs the Ada Long Creative Writing Workshop at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
-Dana Shavin’s essays have appeared in Oxford American, Psychology Today, The Sun, Bark, The Writer, Fourth Genre, Alaska Quarterly Review, Zone 3, Parade.com, and others. She is a national award-winning columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, where she has been a columnist since 2002 and is the editor of the Chattanooga Jewish Federation magazine, The Shofar. Her memoir, The Body Tourist, was published in 2014. She received a MakeWork Literary Arts grant in 2008, and her work has been nominated for inclusion in Best American Essays and for a Pushcart Prize. Visit danashavin.com
-Danielle Hanson is the author of Fraying Edge of Sky (Codhill Press Poetry Prize, 2018) and Ambushing Water (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in over 80 journals, won the Vi Gale Award from Hubbub, was Finalist for 2018 Georgia Author of the Year Award. She is a poetry editor for Doubleback Books and is on the staff of the Atlanta Review. Her poetry has been the basis for visual art included in the exhibit EVERLASTING BLOOM at the Hambidge Center Art Gallery and Haunting the Wrong House, a puppet show at the Center for Puppetry Arts. Visit daniellejhanson.com.
-Sandra Meek has published six books of poems, including Still (Persea, 2020), An Ecology of Elsewhere, Road Scatter, and the Dorset Prize-winning Biogeography, and edited Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad, awarded an Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal. Recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, the Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, three Georgia Author of the Year awards, and two Peace Corps Writers awards, she is co-founding editor of Ninebark Press, director of the Georgia Poetry Circuit, poetry editor of the Phi Kappa Phi Forum, and Dana Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at Berry College.
-Donna Coffey Little is a professor of English at Reinhardt University and the founder of Reinhardt’s Etowah Valley Low-Residency MFA. Her chapbook Fire Street was published in 2012. Her creative nonfiction essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Five Points, StorySouth, Tiferet and Georgia Backroads. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including Calyx, The Atlanta Review, and The Florida Review. Her scholarly articles have appeared in many journals, including Women’s Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, and Contemporary Women’s Writing. She is writing an environmental memoir about Pine Log Mountain. Visit www.etowahvalleypilgrimage.com.
-Katie Yocom’s debut novel, Three Ways to Disappear, won the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature and was named a Barnes & Noble Top Indie Favorite. She is a 2019 recipient of the Al Smith Fellowship Award for artistic excellence, Kentucky’s highest honor for an individual artist, and has written for Newsweek, Salon, LitHub, American Way (the American Airlines magazine), The Louisville Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of the MFA in Writing program at Spalding University, she lives in Louisville and serves as associate director of the low-residency graduate programs of Spalding’s School of Creative and Professional Writing.
The UTC faculty who will be reading include:
-Thomas Balázs is the author of the short story collection Omicron Ceti III (Aqueous Books, 2012). His fiction has also appeared in Best New American Voices, and the AWP Intro Journals Project Award as well as other publications. He was awarded the Theodore Christian Hoepfner Award for best short fiction in 2010.
-Karen Babine is the author of All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer (Milkweed Editions, 2019) and the award-winning Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) and the winner of the 2016 Minnesota Book Award for memoir/creative nonfiction. She also edits Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies.
-Sybil Baker is the author of Immigration Essays, which is UTC’s Read2Achieve selection for 2018-2