Union Ave Books presents an author event featuring award-winning Three Rooms Press author Julia Watts, with poets Susan O’Dell Underwood and Marianne Worthington. The event will be held on September 25, 2022 at 2 pm at Union Ave. Books.

A lifelong Appalachian, Julia Watts is the author of over a dozen novels for adult and young adult readers including the Lambda Literary Award winning Finding H.F., the Lambda Literary Award finalist The Kind of Girl I Am, and the Golden Crown Literary Award winner Secret City. Her 2018 novel Quiver was an Indie Awards finalist, a VOYA Perfect 10 Award winner, and a Southeastern Independent Booksellers’ Okra Pick. She is the co-editor, with Jeff Mann, of the anthology LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia, which was also a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Julia lives in Knoxville and is a member of the East Tennessee Writers’ Hall of Fame and was recently the recipient of the Tennessee Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Award. Julia taught college English for over twenty years, then “retired” to pursue a PhD in Children’s/Young Adult Literature at The University of Tennessee. Her new young adult novel, Needlework, received an Honorable Mention in Foreword’s Indie Awards and was chosen to represent Tennessee at the Library of Congress’s National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.

Susan O’Dell Underwood grew up in Bristol, Tennessee, the daughter and granddaughter of public-school teachers who also farmed. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and holds a PhD in English from Florida State University. She directs the creative writing program at Carson-Newman University, where her husband, artist David Underwood, also teaches. Besides two chapbooks, she has one full-length collection of poetry, The Book of Awe (Iris Press), and her poems, nonfiction, and stories are published in many journals and anthologies, including Oxford American, Ecotone, Bellevue Literary Review, Still: The Journal, and A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia.

Marianne Worthington is a Knoxville native who grew up in the Fountain City neighborhood. She is co-founder and editor of Still: The Journal, an online literary magazine publishing writers, artists, and musicians with ties to Appalachia since 2009. Her work has appeared in Oxford American, CALYX, Chapter 16, and CHEAP POP, among other places. She received the Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council and artist’s grants from Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Berea Appalachian Sound Archives Fellowship. She co-edited Piano in a Sycamore: Writing Lessons from the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop and is author of a poetry chapbook. Her poetry collection, The Girl Singer, was released in late 2021 from Fireside Industries, an imprint of University Press of Kentucky. The Girl Singer won The Weatherford Award for Poetry in 2022. Marianne lives, writes, and teaches in southeast Kentucky.

Please note: spots are limited. Reserve your space here.