From: "Megdell, Anna" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wednesday, October 17, 2018 at 3:38 PM
To: David Ratledge <[log in to unmask]>
Subject:

Knoxville, TN: On Monday, October 22, fiction writer Brad Watson will read as part of the University of Tennessee Creative Writing Series.

Brad Watson is a writer from Meridian, Mississippi. He has taught creative writing and literature at various universities across the country. His books have been honored by The National Book Foundation, The Southern Book Critics Circle, The Guggenheim Foundation, The American Academy of Arts and Letters, and others. His most recent novel, Miss Jane, was published in 2016. He lives near Laramie, Wyoming.

From the New York Times: "Brad Watson . . . has long explored how the peculiarities of our physical selves can be a benediction and a curse (in turns or all at once), how insistently they express nature’s beauty and brutality. He has written variously about adultery and rape, failed fathers and violently derailed romances, murder and hauntings, dead or dying dogs and talking cats, with and without humor, always without sentimentalizing. He is not a writer shocked or disappointed by carnality or by the fact that it often exists alongside virtue. And he has shown, as few writers have, how wildness, in us and in our environment, can be deliverance. In his newest novel, “Miss Jane,” Watson’s facility with upending expectations and upsetting the lines between all sorts of categories — good and bad, normal and abnormal, pride and shame, love and hate — is at its keenest and applied most carefully."

The reading begins at 7 p.m. in Strong Hall, Room 101 on the University of Tennessee Campus. The event is free and open to the public; all are encouraged to attend. 

The mission of the UT Creative Writing Series is to feature “writers of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction from around the country and around the world.” The series is sponsored by the University of Tennessee Department of English.