Poetry Off the Shelf producer Curtis Fox invites Sewanee Writers’ Conference alumnus Joshua Mehigan to guide listeners through Edgar Bowers’s poem “For Louis Pasteur”.
The podcast features Bowers reading his poem at the 1999 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. The poem’s dry-witted epigraph (“Who is Apollo?” College student) introduces Bowers’s concern with, as Fox describes, the “ignorance of the basic historical and cultural facts of the western tradition.” He goes on to say, “For Bowers, that ignorance is a big problem if we have any hope of understanding ourselves.”
Curtis Fox explores the diverse world of contemporary American poetry with readings by poets, interviews with critics, and short poetry documentaries. Joshua Mehigan is a poet and alumnus of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference (Walter E. Dakin Fellow/2005, Tennessee Williams Scholar/2000, Poetry/1999, 2001).
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Richard Bausch, Past Chancellor of The Fellowship of Southern Writers, currently serves as The Moss Chair of Excellence in the Writing Program at The University of Memphis. He is the author of eleven novels and eight collections of stories, including the novels Rebel Powers, In The Night Season, Thanksgiving Night, and Peace; and the story collections Spirits, The Stories of Richard Bausch, Wives & Lovers: 3 Short Novels, and, most recently, Something is Out There. An acknowledged master of the short story form, Bausch has won two National Magazine Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila-Wallace Reader's Digest Fund Writer's Award, the Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2004 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, and, for Peace, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
Allen Wier has published four novels, most recently Tehano, and a collection of stories, Things About to Disappear. He has edited an anthology, Walking on Water and other stories, and co-edited Voicelust, a collection of essays ‘on style in contemporary fiction’. In 2001 he was voted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Robert Penn Warren Award, and a Dobie-Paisano Fellowship from the University of Texas and the Texas Institute of Letters. He holds the Hodges’ Chair for Distinguished Teaching at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.