Contributors to This Issue
Rent from DeepDyve- Contributors to This Issue
Kate Black is the curator of the Appalachian Collection and the archivist at the University of Kentucky. She has completed over forty interviews with vegetable gardeners for her project, Kentucky Garden Stories, and is working on a book based on these interviews. She keeps bees and grows vegetables and fruit in her Lexington, Kentucky, back yard.
Elizabeth Cox was raised on the Baylor School campus in Chattanooga, as the headmaster’s daughter. While doing graduate work with Fred Chappell at U.N.C.-G., her first story was published and then reprinted in two anthologies. She currently shares an endowed chair in creative writing at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, with her husband, Michael Curtis, an editor at The Atlantic. She is the author of a story collection and four novels, the most recent being The Slow Moon.
Nikky Finney won the National Book Award in poetry last year (2011) for her fourth poetry collection, Head Off and Spit: Poems. A charter member of the Affrilachian Poets, she resides in Lexington, Kentucky, where she has been a professor at the University of Kentucky for eighteen years. She credits Nikki Giovanni and Giovanni’s mother for critiquing her first poems and encouraging her through the years.
Virginia C. Fowler is the author of the Twain Series biographies of both Gloria Naylor and Nikki Giovanni and of Conversations with Nikki Giovanni (2008). Her book, Nikki Giovanni, a Literary Biography, is scheduled for publication next January. She is Professor of English at Virginia Tech where she teaches courses in African-American literature.
Joanne Veal Gabbin is Professor of English and Executive Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. She is the author of a book of literary criticism and a children’s book, I Bet She Called Me Sugar Plum (2004) and the editor of four books including Shaping Memories: Reflections of African American Women Writers (2009). [End Page 116]
Nikki Giovanni is one of Oprah Winfrey’s “Twenty-five Living Legends.” The recipient of some twenty-five honorary degrees, she has been named Woman of the Year by Mademoiselle, The Ladies Home Journal, and Ebony. She is the author of seventeen poetry collections, eleven children’s books and ten books of prose. A native of Knoxville, Tennessee, she was raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, but spent summers in Knoxville with her grandparents. Since 1997 she has taught at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.
Jesse Graves grew up in Sharp’s Chapel, Tennessee, in a family that came to America from Germany in 1730. His first poetry collection, Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine (2012), won the Weatherford Award as the outstanding Appalachian poetry book of the year. He teaches English at East Tennessee State University, where he won the College of Arts and Sciences New Faculty Award last spring.
Trudier Harris is the author of books that have been published not only by six different university presses, but also by prominent trade publishers in Boston and New York. After a very distinguished career at the University of North Carolina, she has returned to her home town to accept a Professor of English position at the University of Alabama. Her most recent book is The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South (2009). She is currently at work on a book manuscript assessing Martin Luther King, Jr’s influence on African American literature.
Bell Hooks is, as stated in The Atlantic Monthly, “one of our nation’s leading public intellectuals.” Utne Reader declared her one of “100 Visionaries Who Could Change Your Life.” Her first book Ain’t I a Woman (1999) made Publishers Weekly’s list of “the twenty most influential women’s books in the last twenty years.” She has authored thirty more books, including just this past year, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place and Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice. She serves as Distinguished Professor in Residence in Appalachian Studies for Berea College.
Silas House is the author of three trade novels and one youth novel. He is the co-author of another youth novel, Same Sun Here (2012 with Neela Vaswani) and a work of...
