Author and naturalist Janisse Ray advocates for wildness
In books like Wild Spectacle and Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Georgia author, naturalist, author, and farmer Janisse Ray communicates profound reverence for the profuse complexity within our world’s ecosystems. Ray will be the keynote speaker at the MTSU Write Conference in Murfreesboro on October 7.
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Past and present mingle in collections by Loving, Shockley, and Underwood
In their recently published collections, poets Denton Loving, Evie Shockley, and Susan O’Dell Underwood each find an original expression for the mingling of past and present that presses at the edges of contemporary life.
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A writer returns to the Smoky Mountains and The Overstory
“The Overstory,” writes Emily Choate, “is like the Smokies — a lush host to manifold inhabitants, some knowable to the casual visitor and others elusive, inscrutable.” Choate will lead a virtual discussion of Richard Powers’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel on July 18.
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Katy Simpson Smith’s The Weeds links the stories of two women botanists
Katy Simpson Smith’s The Weeds links the stories of two unnamed women, working in different centuries, who both find themselves apprenticed to male botanists cataloguing every species of plant growing among the stones of the Roman Colosseum.
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Poet Anna Laura Reeve entwines motherhood with the natural world in her luminous debut collection
In her debut collection, Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility, poet Anna Laura Reeve depicts motherhood with startling honesty and insight, enmeshed with experiences of the natural world and the enduring drive to make art. Reeve will discuss the book at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on April 16.
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What Things Cost offers a moving tribute to our nation’s working poor
What Things Cost: an anthology for the people is a landmark collection of labor writing. Editors Rebecca Gayle Howell and Ashley M. Jones center the unsung voices of laborers whose work has been devalued or ignored.
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