Join us for a poetry reading Sunday, May 5th at 2 pm with Iris press poets Lana Austin, Amy Wright, and Linda Parsons.
Lana Austin
Lana K. W. Austin’s poems and short stories have recently been featured in Mid-American Review, Sou’wester, Columbia Journal, Zone 3, Appalachian Heritage, etc. Winner of the 2019 Alabama State Poetry Society Book of the Year Award & 2018 Words & Music Poetry Award, Austin has been a finalist and semi-finalist in multiple other competitions, including the James Wright Poetry Award, the Crab Orchard Review First Book Award, the Zone 3 Book Award, the American Short Fiction Award, the Still: The Journal Fiction Award, and the Machigonne Fiction Award. Born and raised in rural Kentucky, Austin studied creative writing at both Hollins University and the University of Mary Washington and has an MFA from George Mason University (2008). Her full-length poetry collection, Blood Harmony, is from Iris Press (2018) and her chapbook, In Search of the Wild Dulcimer, is from Finishing Line Press (2016). Austin currently resides in Alabama, where she is an instructor in the English department at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
For more information, visit: https://www.lanakwaustin.com/
Amy Wright
Amy Wright is the author of two poetry books, one collaboration, and six chapbooks, including the prose collection Think I’ll Go Eat a Worm. Most recently her essays won first place in two contests, sponsored by London Magazine and Quarterly West. She has also received two Peter Taylor Fellowships to the Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop, an Individual Artist Grant from the Tennessee Arts Commission, and a fellowship to Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her essays appear or are forthcoming in Brevity, Fourth Genre, Georgia Review, Ninth Letter, Waveform: Anthology of Women Essayists, and elsewhere.
For more information, visit: www.awrightawright.com
Linda Parsons
Linda Parsons coordinates WordStream: The Weekly Writer's Voice, sponsored by WDVX-FM, with Stellasue Lee. She is the reviews editor at Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel and has contributed poetry to The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Shenandoah, and Ted Kooser’s syndicated column, American Life in Poetry, among many other journals and anthologies. Her fifth poetry collection is Candescent (Iris Press, 2019). Parsons is also playwright-in-residence for The Hammer Ensemble, the social justice wing of Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville.
