HCTC holds Evening with Poets April 28

An Evening with Poets will be on Thursday, April 28 at HCTC in the Stephens Library on the Hazard Campus. Admission is free and the event begins at 6:30 p.m. This event will be highlighted by the unveiling of the 2016 edition of Kudzu, the college s literary book. Those published in the book will read their work.

This year s issue celebrates Women of Appalachia and the featured readers include Marie Manilla, Darnell Arnoult, Shawna Kay Rodenberg, Carrie Mullins, and Marianne Worthington.

West Virginia native Marie Manilla delights in exploding Appalachian stereotypes in her fiction. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, her novel, The Patron Saint of Ugly, won the Weatherford Award. Shrapnel received the Fred Bonnie Award for Best First Novel. Stories in her collection, Still Life with Plums, originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Mississippi Review, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. Marie teaches in the Low-Residency MFA Program at WV Wesleyan College. She lives in Huntington, WV, her hometown. Learn more atwww.mariemanilla.com.

Darnell Arnoult is Writer-in-Residence at Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee and author of the novel Sufficient Grace, the collection What Travels With Us: Poems, winner of the Weatherford Award and named SIBA Poetry Book of the Year, and her latest collection Galaxie Wagon: Poems. Her shorter works have been published in journals including Southern Cultures, Southwest Review, Asheville Poetry Review, and anthologies such as Appalachia Now: Short Stories of Contemporary Appalachia and Southern Poetry Anthology VI: Tennessee. She is co-editor of Drafthorse: A Literary Journal of Work and No Work and co-director of the LMU Mountain Heritage Literary Festival and Appalachian Young Writers Workshop. She lives in Cumberland Gap, Tennessee with her husband, metal artist William Brock.

Shawna Kay Rodenberg holds her Master of Fine Arts degree from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She works as an English Instructor at Big Sandy Community and Technical College in eastern Kentucky. She is also the founder and host of Slant, a monthly poetry reading in Evansville, Indiana. Her work has appeared in New Millennium Writings, Structo, drafthorse, Free State Review, Crab Creek Review, Kudzu, and The USI 50th Anniversary Anthology. She is a mother of five (two in college) and she lives on a dairy goat farm in southern Indiana.

Carrie Mullins is a fiction writer whose work has been published in Chicago Quarterly Review, Appalachian Heritage, Kudzu, and in the anthology Appalachia Now.. She is an eighth-generation resident of Rockcastle County, Kentucky. In 2015, she was awarded a Kentucky Foundation for Women Artist Enrichment Grant. Her debut novel, Night Garden, will be published by Old Cove Press in March 2016.

Marianne Worthington is the co-founder and poetry editor of Still: The Journal, an online literary journal established in 2009. She is the former poetry editor and book reviews editor for Now amp; Then: The Appalachian Magazine. Her poetry chapbook, Larger Bodies Than Mine, won the Appalachian Book of the Year Award. She received the Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council and is a grant recipient from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Berea College Appalachian Sound Archives Fellowship. Her work has appeared in Grist, Pine Mountain Sand amp; Gravel, Shenandoah, Natural Bridge, Appalachian Heritage, and The Southern Poetry Anthology, among others. A native of Knoxville, Tennessee, she has lived in southeastern Kentucky since 1990 where she works as a teacher, editor, and writer.

The public is invited and refreshments will be served.