Fall Writers’ Series takes listeners on journeys

“Migrants and Stowaways: An Anthology of Journeys” is a collection of poetry, prose, and art that sends the reader across the South, around the globe, and into the human mind. The book, the sixth anthology from the Knoxville Writers’ Guild, was published just this month and is already receiving good reviews. The public is invited to hear four contributors to this collection read excerpts and talk about their work as part of the Fall Writers’ Series at Pellissippi State.

Judy DiGregorio, Jeanne McDonald, Jack Rentfro and Pamela Schoenewaldt will present in the Goins Auditorium October 28, noon-1:30 p.m. The series is sponsored by Writer-in-Residence Edward Francisco, the English Department and the Pellissippi State Foundation.

DiGregorio is an award-winning humor columnist for Senior Living Magazine and was recently named Literary Artist of the Month by the Tennessee Arts Commission. She has published in numerous magazines and newspapers, including The Army/Navy Times, The Writer, CC Motorcycle NewsMagazine, The Church Musician, the Alabama School Journal and New Millennium Writings. Her work has also been broadcast on the WUTC Writers From Home Program in Chattanooga.

McDonald has received numerous awards during her writing career, including first place in a fiction competition for her story “In the Realm of Possibility.” The competition was sponsored by the Center for Appalachian Studies and Services at East Tennessee State University and judged by “Cold Mountain” author Charles Frazier. Her work has also won a Washington Prize in Fiction, a National Writers Association Prize in the organization’s 2001 Novel Contest and a nonfiction publication award from the National League of American Pen Women for a story that appeared in the Knoxville News Sentinel.

McDonald has published short fiction and essays in several anthologies, newspapers, and magazines. Her work is included in the collection “Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia.” A contributing editor to Metro Pulse, McDonald has co-written two books of nonfiction with her husband, Fred Brown: “Growing Up Southern: How the South Shapes Its Writers” and “The Serpent Handlers: Three Families and Their Faith,” which won the Harry Caudill Award for Journalistic Reporting. McDonald’s novel “Water Dreams” was published in September 2003.

Rentfro’s work has appeared in two other Knoxville Writers’ Guild anthologies, “Literary Lunch” (2002) and “Breathing the Same Air” (2000), as well as the soon-to-be-released regional literary anthology “Knoxville Bound” (Cardinal Publishing 2004). He is the editor of and an author in an anthology of more than 100 contributors celebrating Knoxville’s underappreciated pop music history, “Cumberland Avenue Revisited: Four Decades of Music from Knoxville, Tennessee” (Cardinal Publishing 2003). Rentfro describes the project as a labor of love that combines his interests in writing and music. His short story “Earthmother Stormtrooper” won first place for fiction at the 1993 Tennessee Mountain Writers competition.

Rentfro, a freelance writer-editor, is a native of Cleveland, Tenn. He worked for several East Tennessee newspapers, technical journals and other publications after receiving a degree in journalism from the University of Tennessee in 1981. He and his wife, Angie, live on a small farm in north Knox County.

Schoenewaldt lives in Knoxville, where she is writer-in-residence at the University of Tennessee Hodges Library, running the Writers in the Library series. Previously, she lived in Naples, Italy, for 10 years. Her short stories have appeared in Belletrist Review, Bianco su Nero, Carve, Cascando, Crescent Review (winning the Chekhov Prize for Short Fiction), Iron Horse Literary Review, Mediphors, Metro Pulse, MondoGreco, New Letters, New Millennium Writing, Literary Lunch, New Letters, Paris Transcontinental, Pinehurst Journal, Square Lake, The Sun and Women’s Words.

Schoenewaldt’s one-act play in Italian, “Espresso con Mia Madre” (Espresso With My Mother), was produced at Teatro Cilea, Naples. Her novel in progress is a memoir of a 12th century Sicilian empress. She lives with her husband, Maurizio, and daughter, Emilia, and is secretary of the Knoxville Writers’ Guild.

For additional information about the Pellissippi State Fall Writers’ Series, contact Edward Francisco at 694-6744 or efrancisco@pstcc.edu.