The University of Tennessee’s Writers in the Library reading series wraps up its Spring with poets Kevin Young and Brenda Hillman on Thursday, April 12 and Monday, April 16, respectively. Both readings begin at 7 p.m. in the Lindsay Young Auditorium of the John C. Hodges Library and are free and open to the public. (Bios supplied by Writers in the Library.)
Kevin Young on Thursday, April 12, is sponsored by the Department of English Creative Writing Program. Kevin Young is the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Poetry Editor of the New Yorker, and the author of eleven books of poetry and prose.
Young’s newest nonfiction book, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was long-listed for the National Book Award. His most recent book of poetry, Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015, was long-listed for the National Book Award. Book of Hours was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize for Poetry from the Academy of American Poets. His previous nonfiction book, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the PEN Open Book Award; it was also a Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Young was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016.
Brenda Hillman on Monday, April 16
Brenda Hillman is the author of ten collections of poetry: White Dress, Fortress, Death Tractates, Bright Existence, Loose Sugar, Cascadia, Pieces of Air in the Epic, Practical Water, for which she won the LA Times Book Award for Poetry, Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire,which received the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Northern California Book Award for Poetry; and her most recent Extra Hidden Life, Among the Days.
In 2016 Brenda Hillman was named Academy of American Poets Chancellor. Among other awards Hillman has received are the 2012 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the 2005 William Carlos Williams Prize for poetry, and Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Included in their list of “50 of the Most Inspiring Authors in the World,” Poets & Writers states, “[Hillman] reminds us that the language we use when ordering a sandwich is also the language we use to make art. Her environmental concerns prove writers can offer more than just aesthetic pleasure.”
