COOKEVILLE, Tenn. (March 5, 2008) — As a writer, poet, musician, folklorist and historian, Jim Clark is a true Renaissance man — and he will give a presentation of his talents in Tennessee Tech University’s Derryberry Auditorium at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 18.

A Center Stage event, his show is free and open to the public.

Clark, a native of nearby Byrdstown, holds a bachelor’s degree from Vanderbilt University, a master of fine arts from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a doctorate from the University of Denver.

An acclaimed and award-winning writer, he was the Alan Collins Scholar in Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1985 and was chosen to read in the North Carolina Writers’ Network’s Blumenthal Writers and Readers Series in 1997.

Clark’s other awards include the Harriette Simpson Arnow Short Story Award, Randall Jarrell Scholarship and Merrill Moore Writing Award, and he was the recipient of the Jefferson Pilot Outstanding Faculty Member Award for 2002-’03.

He’s written three books, edited a volume of poems, released a compact disc of poems and Appalachian folk music and performed on a CD with his band, The Near Myths.
His latest work, Notions: A Jim Clark Miscellany (Rank Stranger Press, 2007), is an interdisciplinary piece that ranges from short story, personal essay and memoir to scholarly analysis and poetry. It even includes a full-length stage play and a song, titled “One Night Late,” on a CD single.

“Jim Clark’s Notions is not just a book, but a whole environment stocked with the flora and fauna of a life led in words,” said poet and editor R.T. Smith.

Clark has taught at the University of Georgia, Auburn University and Christian Brothers College. He is currently the Elizabeth H. Jordan Professor of Southern Literature and writer-in-residence at Barton College, where he founded and directs the Barton College Creative Writing Symposium.

--Tracey Hackett
This information posted 11 March 2008