The Sundress Academy for the Arts is proud to present the next installment of their workshop series, “Finding an Appetite: Poetry Creative Nonfiction, and Food Writing.” This workshop will be led by Katie Culligan and will be held in Room 252 in the Hodges Library from 6 to 7 pm on October 28th. This event is free and open to the public.
Mark Twain said, “Part of the secret of success is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.” When we begin to consider this active role that food plays in our lives and bodies, we must think about the senses, the land we live on, our families, both nuclear and national, and the labor-system-latticework we all must somehow live in the cracks of. In this workshop, we will investigate together how these considerations, and how food writing in general, can enrich your personal essays and poetry. If you’ve ever grown a mint plant in your kitchen, or waited a table, or eaten a hot dog that your mother cut up to look like an octopus, then you have enough to write about for the foreseeable future. Writers we read together will include those who specialize in both journalism and lyric nonfiction. We will not be reading Mark Twain.
Katie Culligan is a nonfiction writer living in Knoxville, TN, where she is the Fall 2019 Writer in Residence at Sundress Academy for the Arts. She is the recipient of the 2019 Eleanora Burke Award for Nonfiction and the Margaret Artley Woodruff Award for Creative Writing from the University of Tennessee. Recent work appears in Geometry, Noble/ Gas Qtrly, Columbia Journal, American Chordata, and others. She can be reached at katieculliganwriting.com
The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is an artists’ residency that hosts workshops, retreats, and residencies for writers, actors, filmmakers, and visual artists. All are guided by experienced, professional instructors from a variety of creative disciplines who are dedicated to cultivating the arts in East Tennessee.
The Sundress Reading Series is excited to welcome Ellene Glenn Moore, Kimberly Ann Priest, and Katie Culligan for the October installment of our reading series! This event will take place from 1-3 p.m. on Sunday, October 13th at Hexagon Brewing Co., located at 1002 Dutch Valley Dr STE 101, Knoxville, TN 37918.
Ellene Glenn Moore is a writer living in sunny South Florida. She earned her MFA in Poetry from Florida International University and her BA in Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon University. Ellene has been the recipient of a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Fellowship, a scholarship to the New York State Summer Writers Institute, and a residency at The Studios of Key West. She is the co-Founding Editor of the Plath Poetry Project, a collaborative writing project dedicated to engaging with the work of Sylvia Plath. Ellene’s poetry, lyr ic non-fiction, and critical work has appeared in Lake Effect, The Journal, Best New Poets, Fjords Review, Poetry Northwest, Brevity, Salamander, Ninth Letter Online, and elsewhere. Her chapbook The Dark Edge of the Bluff (Green Writers Press, 2017) was runner-up for The Hopper Prize for Young Poets.
from “Driving the Blue Ridge Parkway Above Asheville”
This is a different kind of deliverance;
not from circumstance, but from ourselves.
Winter light turns the bare-boned trees into quicksilver.
Everything important rises to the top—[…]
Kimberly Ann Priest is the author of White Goat Black Sheep (FLP). She is an MFA graduate in Creative Writing from New England College, already holding an MA in English Language & Literature from Central Michigan University. A proud Michigan native, she has taught composition and creative writing courses for Michigan State University, Central Michigan University, and Alma College, and participated in local initiatives to increase awareness concerning sexual assault, survivorship, and healing through artistic expression. She is also an editorial intern and scholarship recipient with Sundress Publications in Knoxville, TN. Her academic and creative writing carefully observes the intersections between motherhood, violence, displacement, religion, sexual identity, and sexual trauma; and her poetry has appeared in several literary journals including The Coachella Review, The Comstock Review, Welter, Ruminate Magazine, RiverSedge, and The Berkeley Poetry Review. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of First-Year Writing at Michigan State University, editorial intern with Sundress, book reviewer for New Pages, and an editor for the Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry.
“Autumn. Leaves drip and turn over,
round like the goblet of a thigh torn from its animal.
Daylight folds into creases,
a jumbled marathon of birds strung loosely along
telephone wires
and my hair canvasing light paned across the bed’s
worn coverlet. (. . . )” –from Practice
Katie Culligan is a nonfiction writer living in Knoxville, TN, where she is the Writer-in-Residence for Sundress Academy for the Arts. She is the recipient of the 2019 Eleanora Burke Award for Nonfiction and the Margaret Artley Woodruff Award for Creative Writing from the University of Tennessee. Recent work appears in Geometry, Noble / Gas Qtrly, Columbia Journal, American Chordata, and others. She can be reached at katieculliganwriting.com.
“Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s ‘At the Moulin Rouge’ (1895) is frequently called a ‘haunted
painting.’ In it, a milky-swath of Parisian bohemians sit around a table, shoulder-to-shoulder; in
the right margin, however, a battery-acid face, seemingly lit below, like scary-story flashlights at
a campfire.
The reason that I have become so fixated on this painting, too, is that it was cut. I say this to all
my friends and get frustrated when they don’t have the physiological reaction that I want them
to. The basest assumption of making art, of leaving our houses inside human bodies every
morning, is that all of it, the material at the very least, will remain intact.”
The Sundress Reading Series is an award-winning literary reading series that is held monthly at 1 p.m. at Hexagon Brewing Co. just outside of downtown Knoxville. The Sundress Reading Series is free and open to the public.
My bookshelf, more than any other thing I own, is a museum of all blueprints I’ve ever had for my life. Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s Time 100 photo watches over everything, cataloguing the time I thought I was going to be an environmental scientist, a movie musical star, a professional corsetiere. The top shelves are a novel-heavy mix of genres, with essay collection taking second place. They are in no particular order because I have made peace with my own mortality.
The bottom shelves are treasured miscellaneous, but not leftovers: a shoebox full of all the nickels and pennies I’ve carried around since the eleventh grade, always meant for something exciting. Not one, but seven college prep books (only opened once in a panic very specific to the year 2013). Every Chicken Soup for the Soul that I snuck out of my mother’s room when I was in middle school. Those books are brilliant and I stand by my desire to keep them near me at all times, still to this day.
Moving northeast, I have a story I wrote in the first grade that my grandparents had bound into a book, wherein I turn myself into a giraffe by eating magical gummy bears. Everyday I think “How am I going to top this?” and everyday I conclude that I am not. Directly underneath in the glass compartment is every Vogue from 2011-2014 because Lady Gaga’s meat dress made me think for a long time that I was interested in fashion; it turns out I’m just interested in weirdos. I also have a traffic ticket taped up because if I don’t make a move on that thing very soon, I will be in a legal situation. Life is a balancing act, or something like that.
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Katie Culligan is currently young and terrified at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she is a junior studying creative writing. Her favorite responsibilities are NCAA rowing, big sisterhood, and believing unwaveringly in ghosts. Her writing is informed by this age of indestructible men, though she likes to think her life isn’t. She also thinks if you haven’t tried fig newtons with peanut butter yet, you really should.
My name is Katie Culligan, and every week, I go to a Space Jam-themed cycling class for seniors that I started going to accidentally, but now go to purposefully.
I learned to read in the city of Buffalo, New York, and learned to drive in the mountains of East Tennessee. I’m a junior creative writing student at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where I am also an affectionate succulent parent. My writing is currently forthcoming on my mother’s refrigerator.
It was a love story between an intense person and an intense pastime when I became a varsity women’s rower for the University of Tennessee. My teammates reinforce everyday that French braids are where girls keep their secret power reserves and they should make you feel very intimidated.
In my free time, I am a purposeful chaos maker in UT’s youngest improv troupe, Cumberland Striptease (that I did not name). When I grow up, I want to be a stately lady that wears bright orange lipstick very poorly and very confidently. Until then, I’m so excited to be here at the Sundress Academy for the Arts looking for my words.
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Katie Culligan is currently young and terrified at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she is a junior studying creative writing. Her favorite responsibilities are NCAA rowing, big sisterhood, and believing unwaveringly in ghosts. Her writing is informed by this age of indestructible men, though she likes to think her life isn’t. She also thinks if you haven’t tried fig newtons with peanut butter yet, you really should.
