Jim Chandler is a retired newspaper reporter and a native of McKenzie, Tennessee. His poems and stories have appeared in numerous small and literary magazines and anthologies in America and abroad. He is the author of the poetry collection Smoke & Thunder and a novel, Parallel Blues, as well as several chapbooks. His latest book is Death on a Dark Highway, a true story detailing the 1993 West Tennessee murder of Dennis Brooks, Jr. In 2006, he undertook a 2,300-mile road trip to video tape poets in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio and spent a year editing it into a two-hour documentary, "Poetry Road -- In Search of the Word."