River Walking: Poems and Stories by Tina and Jim Braziel

You are invited to join us at The Gallery at High Cotton, 230 Water Street, downtown Apalachicola, June 26, 2018, from 5:30-7pm for an exciting Poetry/Fiction Reading Room evening. It is our honor to host such talented writer friends, Tina and Jim Braziel! This is a casual listening room style event. You are welcome to bring a beverage; the gallery will provide light appetizers. The event is free to the public. Donations will be accepted at the door to help support our guests as they travel to pursue creative careers.

 

 

Tina Mozelle Braziel, winner of the 2017 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, directs the Ada Long Creative Writing Workshop at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is a recent recipient of an Alabama State Council for the Arts Fellowship. Her collection of poems, Known by Salt, will be published by Anhinga Press. C. G. Hanzlicek, the final judge of the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry said this about her book:

“Tina Braziel’s Known by Salt is very much a book of celebrations. One arc of the book is the move from a life in trailer parks to a house that Tina and her husband build with their own hands, stud by stud, window by window. It is also a celebration of Alabama, with its forests, its rivers and lakes, and its creatures: snakes, deer, birds, lizards. Her observations are so keen — ‘herons lift their backward knees’ — that they make me laugh out loud in my own celebration. This attention to detail is what Roethke called long looking, and it is everywhere in these well-wrought poems.”

 

James Braziel writes to give voice to the people and the land of the rural South. Originally from a peanut farming community in south Georgia, he now lives on a ridge in north Alabama where he and his wife, Tina Mozelle Braziel, are building a glass cabin by hand. His novels Birmingham, 35 Miles and Snakeskin Road look at a future dust bowl where the South is ravaged by global warming. His essay on the tornadoes that struck Alabama in April 2011 appeared in The New York Times. His stories, essays, and poems have appeared in Chattahoochee Review, Appalachian Heritage, Southern Humanities Review, and other places. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and recently he was an Artist-in-Residence at Hot Springs National Park. He has received fellowships from the Georgia Council for the Arts and the Alabama State Council on the Arts.  He teaches creative writing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and is currently completing a collection of stories titled This Ditch Walking Love inspired by the hilltop communities near his home in Blount County, AL.