Sundress Reading Series Presents Anna Laura Reeve and Mary Leauna Christensen

Knoxville, TN—The Sundress Academy for the Arts is pleased to announce the guests for the August installment of our reading series, poets Anna Laura Reeve and Mary Leauna Christensen. Join us on Thursday, August 24th at Pretentious Beer Co. from 7:00-9:00PM for a reading followed by an open mic hosted by Shlagha Borah.

Sign-up for the open mic begins at 7PM sharp and is limited to 10-12 readers.

Anna Laura Reeve is the author of Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility (Belle Point Press). Winner of the 2022 Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Terrain.org, Salamander, and others. She was a finalist in the 2023 Greg Grummer Poetry Contest and the 2022 Ron Rash Award and is getting into tarot part-time. She lives and gardens in Knoxville Tennessee.

Mary Leauna Christensen, an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, recently received her PhD from the University of Southern Mississippi. Mary is Managing Editor of The Swamp Literary Magazine. Her work can be found in Cream City Review, The Laurel Review, Southern Humanities Review, Denver Quarterly, and The Gettysburg Review, among others. She was named a 2022 Indigenous Nations Poets fellow for the inaugural In-Na-Po retreat and was selected as a returning fellow for 2023.

This event is brought to you in part by a grant provided by the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. Find out about the important work they do here.

Our community partner for August is the Beck Cultural Exchange Center, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization established in 1975 as a result of Knoxville’s Urban Renewal projects. The projects relocated and displaced many Black families, churches and businesses. Absent of the establishment of Beck, these places and the people may never have existed. Beck is the storehouse of African American history and culture and is designated by the state as a primary repository of Black history and culture in East Tennessee.

Learn more about the work the Beck Cultural Exchange Center does here!