Visiting Nonfiction Writer Amy Wright, Nov. 10

By Stacie Worrel

The English Department’s creative writing program features visiting nonfiction writer Amy Wright giving a public reading of her work on Nov. 10 at 7:30 p.m. in Galbreath Chapel.

Wright is an award-winning essayist. Her essays appear in Lit Hub , DIAGRAM , Georgia Review , Kenyon Review , and elsewhere. Wright is also the author of three poetry books and six chapbooks.

“Amy Wright achieves a range and depth in her work that continually dazzles me,” said Eric LeMay , associate professor and Stocker Professor of Creative Writing in the College of Arts & Sciences. “She's a poet, an essayist, a science writer, a nature writer, an experimentalist, a mixed-media explorer. Each new work she creates is a generous adventure of insight and possibility.”

Wright’s latest book Paper Concert: A Conversation in the Round , published in 2021, is a book-length essay that weaves together a multitude of conversations Wright has had with philosophers, writers, musicians, and other thinkers. In the opening chapter, Wright calls these thinkers “representatives of the human population,” noting, “Some of them are famous, some will be, some should be—but all refract the light of the unknowable mystery of the self.”

Wright has received two Peter Taylor Fellowships to The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Tennessee Arts Commission, and a fellowship to Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is serving as the 2022 Wayne G. Basler Chair of Excellence at East Tennessee State University. She is also the senior editor of Zone 3 journal, the nonfiction editor of Zone 3 Press, and coordinator of Creative Writing at Austin Peay State University.