Reading Information for Dec. 4th

Hey Gang,

I hope everybody’s doing well and gearing up for (hopefully) an abbreviated work week. I’ve posted a few times about the upcoming reading at Winder Binder on Dec. 4^th. Here’s some information that Brother Ray Zimmerman provided for the event. Enjoy:

Winder Binder Gallery and Bookstore

40 Frazier Avenue
Sunday, December 4
2 PM to 4 PM

For your friends who like to read, books make the perfect gift. Join local authors for dynamic readings and recitations of their work. Many of the participating writers have published books available for purchase at Winder Binder.

Finn Bille, author or Fire Poems and contributor to Southern Light: Twelve Contemporary Southern Poets. Finn has been writing, reading, teaching, publishing, and promoting poetry since his teenage years in Copenhagen, Denmark. The International People’s College in Elsinore, Denmark, published his chapbook, Waking Dreams (1986). His collection of poems, Rites of the Earth, appeared in 1994 with notes on each poem and an article on revision. Bille has published about eighty poems individually in various magazines and anthologies. Fire Poems appeared in 2011.

Ray Zimmerman Executive Editor and contributor to Southern Light: Twelve Contemporary Southern Poets. Ray is a former president of the Chattanooga Writers Guild and won Second Place in the 2007 poetry contest of the Tennessee Writers Alliance. His chapbook, Searching for Cranes, received favorable commentary in Bloomsbury Review. He has organized poetry readings at Pasha Coffee House and other Chattanooga venues. Ray was the subject of a feature article in the September 2008 issue of Blush Magazine. He read from Southern Light at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, Tennessee in October of 2011.

Christian Collier, author of Ghosts and Echoes. Christian J. Collier was born in Slidell, LA and attended the University of Tampa. He is the author of two chapbooks, most recently Ghosts & Echoes. His works have appeared in Oysters & Chocolate, DEBACLE, The New Writer and other literary publications. He is also the founder, promoter, and host of The Speakeasy poetry open-mic and the MANIFEST arts showcase in Chattanooga, TN. In 2011, Mr. Collier was featured on the IndieFeed Performance Poetry Channel. The site prides itself on featuring the best spoken word artists working in the field.

Bruce Majors, author of The Fields of Owl Roost and contributor to Southern Light: Twelve Contemporary Southern Poets. Bruce grew up in East Tennessee, graduated from Tennessee Technological University, and retired from the Tennessee Valley Authority. He has published poems in Arts and Letters, Pinesong, The Distillery, River Poets Journal, Number One, and other literary journals. His book, The Fields of Owl Roost, is an autobiographical collection of loosely related poems that has been said to capture the eccentricity of our imperfect world. It was named first finalist in the 2005 Indie Excellence Book Awards.

Marsha Matthews, author of Northbound Single Lane and Sunglow and a Touch of Nottingham Lace.

Helga Kidder, contributor to Southern Light, Twelve Contemporary Southern Poets received a BA in English from the University of Tennessee and an MFA in Writing from Vermont College. She is a co-founder of the Chattanooga Writers Guild and leads their poetry group. Her poetry and translations have been published in many journals and anthologies. Her chapbook Gravel was published by Poetry Miscellany Chapbooks, UTC, Chattanooga, in 1994. Her chapbook Why I Reach for the Stars was a finalist in the Firewheel Chapbook competition.

Penny Dyer is the recipient of the 2007 Oberon Poetry Prize and the 2006 Louisiana Literature Prize for Poetry. Her work also appears in Original Sin: The Seven Deadlies Come Home to Roost, Southern Reader, Poems Niederngasse, SouthLit, Arsenic Lobster, Dogwood, Oberon, New Millennium Writings and Narrative. Penny writes in several genres and is at work on a poetry collection, Awaiting the Fall of Babylon, and a novel, How Sweet the Sound. Her poem “Summer Storm, 1963” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She read her poems from Southern Light at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, Tennessee, in July of 2011.

Rebecca Cook writes poetry and prose and has published in many literary journals, including New England Review, Northwest Review, New Orleans Review, Wicked Alice, Midwest Quarterly, Story South, and Quarter After Eight. A two-time Pushcart nominee, she was awarded a writer’s residency at Dairy Hollow Writers’ Colony in 2005, and she was a Margaret Bridgman Scholar in fiction at the 2009 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her chapbook of poems, The Terrible Baby, is available from Dancing Girl Press. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga. 

For further information, contact Ray Zimmerman: znaturalist@yahoo.com