Excerpt from “Coventry,” by Joseph Bathanti

Editor’s Note:  Italics appear in the original.  From Chapter 51 in Coventry             One afternoon, Papa and Frank and I were out fetching a convict named Tombs. He’d been gone the better part of three hours before we got started after him. Papa was never in a hurry. It was his theory that a run […]

Allen Mendenhall Interviews Joseph Bathanti, Author of “Coventry”

AM:  Joseph, I’m thankful for the opportunity to interview you about Coventry, which is set in a prison camp. Like you, I’ve taught in prison. I took a prison literature course in graduate school. I’ve written about Moundsville Penitentiary in West Virginia and about my experience teaching in prison. So I’m particularly pleased to see […]

Allen Mendenhall Interviews Amy Susan Wilson, Publisher of Red Dirt Press

AM:  Amy, thanks for doing this interview about Red Dirt Press. Congratulations, too, for reaching the six year mark. You focus on publishing poetry and prose that examines the complexities and diversities of the New South. You also have a focus on social justice issues that are global in nature yet connect to the New […]

May Read of the Month: “A Part of Me,” by Julia Nunnally Duncan

Reviewed by Joseph Bathanti Julia Nunnally Duncan’s incantatory new volume of poems, A Part of Me, is the lyric inventory of all that has passed before the poet’s eye, committed deftly to the page, a litany of praise-songs and elegies. If Memory (Mnemosyne, the Greek Titan Goddess) is indeed the Mother of the Muses, then Duncan […]

Joseph Bathanti

Joseph Bathanti is former Poet Laureate of North Carolina (2012-14) and the author of several books of poetry, including Communion Partners; Anson County; The Feast of All Saints; This Metal (nominated for the National Book Award and winner of the Oscar Arnold Young Award); Land of Amnesia; Restoring Sacred Art (winner of the 2010 Roanoke Chowan Prize, awarded annually […]

“Half of What I Say Is Meaningless,” by Joseph Bathanti

Reviewed by Frederick Parker The way I see it, memoir should do more than tell a story. It should chomp at the bit to reveal something, maybe truths about who authors really are when nobody is looking, or encoded realities waiting for just the right moment to show themselves. I want memoirs that leave me […]