Zone 3 and the Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts are very excited to host a reading with L. S. McKee and Tiana Clark. This reading celebrates the launch of McKee’s debut poetry collection, Creature, Wing, Heart, Machine, the winner of our 2022 First Book Award in Poetry judged by author Tiana Clark.
Join us for some poetry and light refreshments on Thursday, October 12 at 7:00 PM. This event is free and open to the public, and it will be hosted in the Art + Design building on Austin Peay’s campus.
In Creature, Wing, Heart, Machine, through a series of narrative and lyric poems, we follow the central protagonist, Alva, as she grapples with heartbreak, desire, mortality and her search for love in a world where both Nature and relationships are increasingly shaped by technology. From the desert to MRI machines to online dating to the Large Hadron Collider to the flora and fauna of natural and imagined worlds, Alva seeks meaning and the keys to human connection.
L.S. McKee holds an MFA from the University of Maryland and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. As a teacher, she specializes in creative writing, STEAM (STEM + Arts/Humanities) education, interdisciplinary and technical writing curriculum, and pedagogical collaboration. She has taught at several institutions, including MIT, where she taught writing across subjects, including Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, and Robotics. Currently, she is Coordinator of Writing Across the Curriculum at the University of Georgia. She grew up in the mountains of East Tennessee and, after several years in San Francisco, Atlanta, and Boston, now lives Athens, Georgia with her family.
Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collection, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize; and Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016), selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark is a graduate of Vanderbilt University (M.F.A) and Tennessee State University (B.A.) where she studied Africana and Women’s studies. Clark is currently working on her next two books, Begging to be Saved, a memoir-in-essays reckoning with Black burnout, millennial divorce, faith, art making, and what lies on the other side of survival; and Scorched Earth, a poetry collection, tracing the complexities of relationship beginnings and endings, loneliness, desire, and joy, which sold to Jenny Xu at Atria.
