FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: In 2022, Brandon Taylor spoke with Chapter 16 about his Southern roots, his Baptist upbringing, how his brief career as a scientist has influenced his writing, and why he has been increasingly drawn to analog technologies in our digitally obsessed world.
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: In A Better Life for Their Children, photographer Andrew Feiler explores the history of the Rosenwald Schools, a collaboration between Booker T. Washington and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald that brought education to thousands of Black children in the segregated South. Feiler’s photographs are featured in an exhibition at the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville through May 21.
Literary and academic institutions in Tennessee have long served as hubs for acclaimed writing, and none more notably than the University of the South, home to The Sewanee Review and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Both organizations are working to elevate a new generation of writers who better reflect the growing diversity of the region and the country.
Chattanooga-born R. Marie Griffith, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in the history of American religion, mines the depths of America’s past, arguing that our beloved national timeline is intertwined with — and often defined by — past injustices toward women, people of color, and immigrants, sins that continue to haunt us today.
In the final pages of Southbound, Anjali Enjeti’s collection of essays on identity, race, and Southern politics, the author poses one simple but thorny question that looms like a ghost over much of the work: “Who am I?”
