'Place' Focus of Knoxville Writers' Guild Program

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. - July 15, 2014 - PRLog -- Award-winning author Elizabeth Gentry will speak about 'place' and how it informed her dark fairy tale "Housebound" at the Knoxville Writers' Guild's August program.

The event, which will be open to the public, begins at 7 p.m., Thursday, Aug. 7, at the Laurel Theater, at the corner of Laurel Avenue and 16^th Street in Fort Sanders, Knoxville. A $2 donation is requested at the door. The building is handicapped accessible. Additional parking is available at Redeemer Church of Knoxville, 1642 Highland Ave.

"I will be talking about the origins of the novel - how I was working to capture the mood of a number of places that I have visited or lived even as the novel itself does not have an explicitly identified setting," Gentry said.

She believes the program will appeal to a wide range of writers because, "Writers of all genres often work from images, memories or associations with specific places, which was reinforced for me recently when I taught an open-genre class with a place theme at John C. Campbell Folk School."

Gentry’s debut novel "Housebound" was published in 2013 by &NOW Books - an imprint of Lake Forest College Press that supports innovative literature - and distributed by Northwestern University Press. The novel was awarded the 2012 Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer Award, which was judged by novelist and fairy tale advocate Kate Bernheimer, who also wrote an introduction for the book. Originally from Asheville, NC, Elizabeth lives in Knoxville, where she works as writing specialist for the University of Tennessee College of Law and teaches for the English Department. She received an MFA in fiction writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Reviews and an excerpt from her novel can be found at www.elizabethlgentry.com. For more information about this and other KWG events, please visit www.knoxvillewritersguild.org.