Commission Names 2025 Fellows in Literary Arts
By Lee Baird, Director of Literary Arts –
McCarthy, Agee, Giovanni, Patchett, Marius; with these being just a few names from a list too long to cite, it’s well established that our state has a storied literary tradition. We can add the names Eaddy, Guth, and White to that list. In recognition of their outstanding contributions to Tennessee’s literary landscape, they have been awarded Individual Artist Fellowships in Literature for 2025. These fellowships are awarded annually to outstanding writers in the categories for Fiction, Poetry, and writing for children or young adults. Let’s get to know them.
Former art director Susan Eaddy writes and illustrates children’s books in her attic studio in Nashville. Drawing on her own childhood experiences such as her mother framing a rooster she drew in kindergarten and having a teacher read one of her compositions aloud to the class, she recognizes that inspiration in elementary school can have far reaching effects. For her writing stories and creating art for children’s books is a privilege and nothing is more important. She says “Books can give kids a context for navigating some of the universal situations in this world, whether they are funny, confusing, or scary.” In addition to having published ten picture books, she shares her art and stories with children in classroom visits not only here in Tennessee, but also as far away as Taiwan, Hong Kong, Brazil, and Switzerland. Check out her amazing books and illustrations on her website.
Retired English professor of Jackson, Tennessee, Ryan Guth’s work can’t be easily slotted into any single poetic form or tradition. His poems combine the lyric and the narrative in a variety of textual formats, including verse, prose, and hybrid forms of his own creation. In his book Body and Soul, he employs frequent shifts in form and point of view to depict the inner life of the work’s protagonist, a technique appreciated by this year’s poetry adjudicator who writes, “These multi-voiced sequences are wide-ranging and ambitious in their effort to convey divergent human lives and experiences, and in one case the multiple personalities of a single character. The poet’s formal choices for each piece propels each voice distinctively and successfully; the diction and syntax for each is clearly deliberate and evokes these multiple characters and their circumstances.” Ryan tells us that this fellowship will allow him to create an author website and further research on his next project, focusing on the Brontës.
For Knoxville novelist Charles Dodd White, the connection humans have to nature and how that relationship informs people’s ways of being with each other is at the heart of his work. Inspired by conservation-minded writers like Wendell Barry and William Gay, he has written four novels plumbing the depths of man’s obligation to the environment; understanding that even the most artificial constructions of human behavior are extensions of that natural reverence or lack thereof. He takes pride in being a prose stylist, saying, “Everything we write is a way to emphasize a different way of seeing. This commitment is important to me because I find that it makes the written word perpetually relevant, regardless of a culture that makes more room for other ways of artistic expression. Style is not an aspect of my writing. Its uniqueness is the thing itself.” This fellowship will allow him to work on his next novel, set against the backdrop of the Kingston coal ash spill of 2008. A perfect match of writer to subject. Learn more about Charles here.
It is an honor to be able to recognize the work of these great Tennessee authors with the Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature. Please join us in congratulating them.
