Knoxville, TN – The Sundress Academy for the Arts is pleased to announce the guests for the September installment of our reading series, poets Elise Thi Tran and Raye Hendrix. Join us on Thursday, September 12th at Pretentious Beer Co. from 7:00-9:00 PM for a reading followed by an open mic! Sign-up for the open mic begins at 7 PM sharp and is limited to 10-12 readers.
Elise Thi Tran is a Vietnamese-Filipina-American writer and poet. She is the 2022 First Pages Prize winner and a fiction judge for NYC Midnight. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Blackbird, diode, Copper Nickel, The Kenyon Review, the Minnesota Review, Salt Hill, TIMBER, and elsewhere.
Dr. Raye Hendrix is a writer from Alabama. Her debut poetry collection, What Good Is Heaven, was just released from Texas Review Press in their Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series. Raye has also authored two poetry chapbooks and is the winner of the Keene Prize for Literature (2019) and Southern Indiana Review’s Patricia Aakhus Award (2018). Their work appears in American Poetry Review, The Journal, Poetry Northwest, The Seventh Wave, 32 Poems, and elsewhere. Raye is the poetry editor of Press Pause Press and a co-editor of Dis/Connect: A Disability Literature Column from Anomalous Press. Learn more at rayehendrix.com.
This event is brought to you in part by grants provided by the Tennessee Arts Commission.
Each month we split donations with our community partner. Our community partner for September is Bridge Refugee Services. It is the only refugee and protected class resettlement agency in East Tennessee (operating in Knoxville and Chattanooga).
This nonprofit organization’s mission is to provide opportunities for clients to rebuild their lives after suffering persecution. The organization is committed to providing protection and assistance for clients’ journeys “from despair to dignity”. It recognizes their plight, resilience, and willingness to join the East Tennessee community and make it their own. Bridge Refugees Services works to help clients promote their rights within their communities and helps them find peace in their new homes while supporting each client’s hope for a new life and a brighter future. You can learn more about this organization here.
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