Preview of Brown & Heil

We are so exciting to be hosting J. Camp Brown & Kathleen Heil on Friday, 9 Nov. at 10:00 a.m. that we wanted to share a bit about each of them in advance.

You are not going to want to miss this!

 J. Camp Brown is a mandolinist living in Fort Smith, AR with his wife and sons.  He has spent much of the last decade playing bluegrass -- with its gospels, its murderous ballads, its sorrowful, lost loves, and its dueling impulses to both ramble from and return to the home place -- in dive bars, for fish fries, on street corners, at hecklers, and amidst various congregations of burlesque dancers, bikers, and old timers.  He is a 2012 Arkansas Arts Council Fellow and an MFA candidate at the University of Arkansas.   His poems have appeared in Nashville Review and Prick of the Spindle.  

J. Camp Brown’s poetry is thick with back roads and juke joints, sex and the Lord.  Constructing a larger, though lyrically murky, narrative that follows a contemporary minstrel through domestic and spiritual crises and triumphs, Brown's persona is part soliloquist, part dramatist, part preacher, and a large part miscreant.  His poems are for anyone that loves music, everyone that has hated love, and all those that have been stranded by a flat tire.

Kathleen Heil's fiction, essays, and poetry have been published, in English and Spanish, in The Barcelona Review, Hermano Cerdo, The Rumpus, PANK, and Pear Noir!, among others. Originally from New Orleans, Kathleen has a Master’s degree in Creación Literaria from the Escuela Contemporánea de Humanidades in Madrid, and currently resides in the U.S., where she is the 2012 Walton Fellow in Translation at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. More info at kathleenheil.net.

Happy relationships might be all alike, but every unhappy relationship is unhappy in its own way, and Kathleen Heil’s fiction is a record of her interest in exploring the hope and loss found at the intersection where love, desire, sex, and estrangement meet in her book-length manuscript of short stories Profane Love. When not translating short stories by the Argentinian writer Patricio Pron, Heil is currently at work on a novel about art, life, and Andy Warhol entitled You Disappoint Me.