A Trio of Writers: Susan Underwood, Linda Parsons, Catherine Pritchard Childress

Writers Susan Underwood, Linda Parsons, and Catherine Pritchard Childress will visit City Lights Bookstore on Saturday, September 16th at 3 p.m.

Susan O’Dell Underwood grew up in Bristol, Tennessee, the daughter and granddaughter of public-school teachers who also farmed. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and holds a PhD in English from Florida State University. She directs the creative writing program at Carson-Newman University, where her husband, artist David Underwood, also teaches. Besides two chapbooks, she has one full-length collection of poetry, The Book of Awe (Iris Press), and her poems, nonfiction, and stories are published in many journals and anthologies, including Oxford American, Ecotone, Bellevue Literary Review, Still: The Journal, and A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia.

Poet and essayist Linda Parsons earned a BA and an MA in English literature from the University of Tennessee. She is the author of the poetry collections Home Fires (1997), Mother Land (2008), and Bound (2011), and Candescent (2019). Her subjects include gardening, childhood, and family history—five generations, from her granddaughter through her own grandmother, are depicted in Bound.  

Parsons is a member of the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame. She has received grants from the Tennessee Arts Commission and the Knoxville Arts Council as well as a Tennessee Writers Alliance award in poetry. She works as an editor and a policy analyst for the University of Tennessee’s internal audit department. In 2020, she was poetry editor for Texas-based Madville Publishing.

Catherine Pritchard Childress lives in the Appalachian Mountains of East Tennessee, where she teaches writing and literature at Lees-McRae College. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in North American Review, Louisiana Literature, Connecticut Review, Still: The Journal, The Cape Rock, Town Creek Poetry, drafthorse, Stoneboat, Kaimana, and Kudzu Literary Magazine, among other journals. She is the author of Other (Finishing Line Press 2015) and Outside the Frame (Eastover Press 2023).