Poetry. In 1992 Earl S. Braggs won the Anhinga Prize, selected by Marvin Bell, for HAT DANCER BLUE. In 1998, supported by a summer fellowship from the University of Tennessee, he travelled to Russia. HOUSE ON FONTANKA is the product of that trip to Russia. Braggs' foreword indicates the tone and context of his new book perfectly: I would remember Langston Hughes' trip to Russia and the Negro in the American South movie, intended but never made. I would remember Claude McKay's speech to the Com-Intern and the book of essays America refused to publish. But he goes on, Braggs writes, to find my love had also grown into the profile of Anna Akmhmatova sitting quietly on the banks of the Black Sea... The pages of this book are crowded by people whom he loves like lost and found brothers and sisters. The pages of this book are flooded by love. Acoridng to the poet's own definition, this book is a 'guided, but unguarded tour' -- Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Author City: CHATTANOOGA, TN USA

Earl S. Braggs, UC Foundation Professor and Herman H. Battle Professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, is the author of Hat Dancer Blue, winner of the 1992 Anhinga Prize selected by Marvin Bell, WALKING BACK FROM WOODSTOCK, HOUSE ON FONTANKA, CROSSING TECUMSEH STREET, IN WHICH LANGUAGE DO I KEEP SILENT, and YOUNGER THAN NEIL. "After Allyson," a chapter from his yet to be published novel, Looking for Jack Kerouac, won the 1995 Jack Kerouac Literary Prize. Other awards include a Tennessee Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant and a Chattanooga Allied Arts Individual Artist Grant. Supported by Summer Fellowships from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, he traveled and wrote in Russia in 1998, France on 2002, and Spain in 2005. He is a native of Wilmington, North Carolina.

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