Austin Peay State University grad Chase Davenport to study poetry at Robert Frost’s summer farmhouse

Clarksville, TN – During the summer months, the great American poet Robert Frost liked to stay in a small, white clapboard farmhouse in rural New Hampshire. According to the website www.literarytraveler.com, he later wrote to a friend about his first experience at the farm.

“Our summer was one of the pleasantest we have had for years… There is a pang there that makes poetry,” Frost wrote.

[Read more]

Poet Blas Falconer to read at Austin Peay State University March 1st

Clarksville, TN – Dr. Blas Falconer, an award-winning poet and an associate professor of English at Austin Peay State University, will read from his new collection of poems, “The Founding Wheel,” during a special reading at 8:00pm, March 1st, in the Morgan University Center.

The event is free and open to the public.

[Read more]

APSU Visiting Writers Series presents Blas Falconer Poetry Reading March 1st

Clarksville, TN – On Friday, March 1st, 2013 there will be a Poetry Reading by Blas Falconer at Austin Peay State University, The reading will start at 8:00pm at the Morgan University Center.

Poet and editor Blas Falconer will read from his new collection of poems, The Foundling Wheel (Four Way Books, 2012).

[Read more]

Austin Peay State University’s Dr. Blas Falconer edits anthology on “other” Latino experiences

Clarksville, TN – Dr. Blas Falconer, a poet and Austin Peay State University professor of English, grew up in northern Virginia, the son of a Puerto Rican mother and a Caucasian father of German-Scottish descent. Occasionally, in an effort to reconnect with his mother’s heritage, he’d flip through books of verse by the Puerto Rican poets who populated New York City’s Spanish Harlem neighborhood. But when he read this poetry, he felt disconnected from his heritage.

“My identity was shaped by my Latino background, and yet I struggled to identify with a lot of Latino literature being published,” he said. “A lot of it came from these centers of Latino communities – the Puerto Rican community in New York or the Cuban-American community in Miami or the Mexican-American, the Chicano community, in the American Southwest. And so, a lot of the writing that came out of there addressed community concerns.” [Read more]

APSU Center of Excellence Creates YouTube Videos about Upcoming Fall Performances

Clarksville, TN – One of the perks of attending the state’s designated liberal arts university, with Tennessee’s only Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts, is there’s no shortage of things to do. On almost any night of the week, Austin Peay State University freshmen can attend poetry readings, art gallery openings, plays, dance performances or musical concerts, all within a few feet of their residence halls.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJM_igMi8Ck

[Read more]

APSU Professor and Poet Falconer Awarded Prestigious NEA Fellowship

Clarksville, TN – Dr. Blas Falconer, a local poet and an associate professor of English at Austin Peay State University, has been awarded a prestigious creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts.

His work was selected from among 1,063 applicants as deserving of the honor, which brings with it an award of $25,000. The NEA’s creative writing fellowships are meant to encourage the production of new works of literature by providing writers with the time and financial support to write. [Read more]

Architectural Heritage Bus Tour Kicks Off 2010 Clarksville Writer’s Conference

Where can you overhear a discussion of the war in ’62 and learn that it’s not Viet Nam being discussed but the War Between the States? Where can you find out a ghost may be lurking right down town in Clarksville? Where can you see tobacco leaves highlighted in the stained glass windows of an exquisite historic church?

The answer to all these questions is the Architectural Heritage Tour that is the first episode in the Sixth Annual Clarksville Writers’ Conference.

Here’s what you missed if you weren’t on the tour conducted by Josh Wright. He co-chaired with Micki Daugherty this year’s tour. Architect Wright gave a brief overview of each location to be visited during a presentation at the Riverview Inn where the group of 30 writers and history buffs met at 9:00am on Wednesday. [Read more]

Do not Miss the Sixth Annual Clarksville Writer’s Conference

Writing is a lonely profession. Oh, sure, you have lots of company when you’re researching your project (unless all your research in on the Internet), but when you sit down and face that blank page, you’re on your own, my friend.

When an opportunity like the Sixth Annual Clarksville Writer’s Conference comes along, no writer can afford to miss it. Just rubbing shoulders with these highly successful people will give you impetus to keep on creating those masterpieces of your own.

Keep in mind, however, that you don’t have to be a writer to attend. You can be an avid reader and get a wealth of experiences from it too. [Read more]

Alice Randall to Keynote Sixth Annual Clarksville Writers Conference

The Clarksville Arts & Heritage Development Council is pleased to announce the Sixth Annual Clarksville Writers Conference, being held July 28th – 31st, 2010, on the campus of Austin Peay State University.

This year’s conference opens with a new two-day tour centered around Clarksville’s rich architectural heritage. Participants will tour structures which tell stories of a community that began in the late 1700’s as a river city, weathered the Civil War, and later became a world center for the dark-fired tobacco trade.

We are very honored to have as this year’s keynote speaker ALICE RANDALL, award-winning songwriter and author of Rebel Yell, Pushkin and the Queen of Spades, and The Wind Done Gone, the New York Times bestselling parody of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind. Randall, a Harvard graduate and current Writer-In-Residence at Vanderbilt University, will speak at the conference banquet at the Clarksville Country Club on the evening of Friday, July 30th. [Read more]