With the Pulitzer Prize-winning King: A Life, Jonathan Eig has written the definitive biography of Martin Luther King Jr. for this generation. Eig will discuss King: A Life at the 2025 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, October 18-19.
Brian Kwoba’s Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism examines the life and legacy of an activist, intellectual, and journalist who challenged the status quo on race, politics, capitalism, and romantic relationships.
In How College Presidents Succeed, Michael Nelson extracts wisdom from three generations of a family known as “Virginia’s academic dynasty.”
Confederate Sympathies analyzes the Civil War and its aftermath in the South by weaving histories of literature, politics, and sexuality. Its author, Andrew Donnelly, will be in conversation with Eva Payne at Novel in Memphis on April 28.
Keith B. Wood, a leading scholar of sports in Memphis, reconstructs the history of the Memphis Red Sox, a longstanding team in the Negro Leagues and a pillar of the city’s Black community. Wood will discuss The Memphis Red Sox: A Negro Leagues History at the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville on April 12.
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: When she died in 1960, Zora Neale Hurston left behind a manuscript that tells the story of Oluale Kossola, known in the United States as Cudjo Lewis, the last survivor of the transatlantic slave trade. With editing by Hurston scholar Deborah G. Plant, Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” was published in 2018.
