Readings by Award Winning Poets

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KB Ballentine was recognized with a prestigious Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize in 2007. Gathering Stones, her first collection of poetry, was released by Celtic Cat Publishing in February of 2008. The book is arranged as a trilogy of poems about the folklore, history and beauty of Ireland. Poems reflect her own travels to the Emerald Isle, home of her ancestors.

Ray Zimmerman read his poem "Glen Falls Trail," at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, in October of 2007. The poem took second place in the Tennessee Writers Alliance poetry contest, and the reading was part of an awards ceremony for that contest and a fiction contest. He is a contributing author to The Hellbender Press, an environmental newspaper published in Knoxville.

Bruce Majors is the author of The Fields of Owl Roost, finalist for the Indie Excellence 2007 book awards competition. These awards are given to books published by small and independent publishers.

Helga Kidder's poem "O'Keeffe's Purple Petunia" won first place in the Alabama State Poetry Society's "Oil on Canvas Award" competition. She has published numerous poems and won several poetry prizes.

Penny Dyer is the recipient of the 2007 Oberon Poetry Prize, and the 2006 Louisiana Literature Prize for Poetry. Her work also appears or is forthcoming in Original Sin: The Seven Deadlies Come Home to Roost, SouthernReader, Poems Niederngasse, SouthLit, Arsenic Lobster, Dogwood, Oberon, and Narrative. Her articles have appeared in the Chattanooga Pulse, an alternative newsweekly. Penny writes in several genres, but is also 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.

(Text via alliedartschattanooga.org)