Christina Catherine Martinez, recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in 2018, is one of the featured readers at the upcoming Meacham Writers’ Workshop (photo credit: Jill Petracek).
Writer, actor, comedian and award-winning Los Angeles-based art critic Christina Catherine Martinez and four writers whose passion for creative writing blossomed during their undergraduate days at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga will be featured at the upcoming 2024 Spring Meacham Writers’ Workshop.
The workshop will take place March 21-23 at various UTC campus locations, ArtsBuild (301 E. 11th St. in Chattanooga) and Stove Works (1250 E. 13th St. in Chattanooga).
The 2024 Spring Meacham Writers’ Workshop, which is free and open to the public, consists of readings and workshops with the goal of creating an informal setting where well-known writers from around the country, local writers, students, novice writers and their readers can freely and equally exchange ideas, works and readings.
The three-day event is supported primarily by an endowment funded by the late Jean Meacham—a professor and assistant dean of students at UTC—in honor of her husband, Ellis K. Meacham, to promote writing as an expressive art and to bring together University and community writers and readers. The workshop’s mission is to give UTC students and underserved members of the community access to the literary arts.
“We are extremely excited to bring Christina Catherine Martinez to the spring workshop,” said UC Foundation Professor Sybil Baker, the Meacham Writer’s Workshop director and associate head of the UTC Department of English. “She is a writer, actor, comedian and award-winning art critic, and—as a Meacham Fellow—will participate in multiple events during her time in Chattanooga.
“At the same time, we are equally excited to co-sponsor a reading and reception with Alumni Affairs at ArtsBuild featuring four talented UTC alumni.”
Martinez, recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in 2018, will lead a reading at StoveWorks from 5-7 p.m. on Friday, March 22. Her essays and cultural criticism have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Aperture, Frieze, Artforum, Bookforum, e-flux criticism, DOCUMENT Journal and Texte Zur Kunst.
UTC alumni L.S. McKee, Emilia Phillips, Alice Smith and Cynthia Young will participate in an alumni reading and reception from 5-7 p.m. on Thursday, March 21, at ArtsBuild.
- McKee ’02, winner of the 2022 Zone 3 First Book Award in Poetry, is the Writing Across the Curriculum coordinator in the University of Georgia’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences English Department.
- Phillips ’09 is a poet, nonfiction writer and book reviewer and an associate professor of creative writing in the University of North Carolina Greensboro Department of English.
- Smith ’71 is a Lookout Mountain-based poet and author of numerous books.
- Young ’21 was a finalist for 2019 Georgia Author of the Year for her chapbook, “Migration.” Her work has appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle, Grist journal, The Amistad, Sixfold, The Ekphrastic Review and Catalpa: a magazine of Southern perspectives.
For a full schedule of events and to learn more about the spring 2024 Meacham Writers’ Workshop, visit www.utc.edu/arts-and-sciences/english/meachamwriters.
