In her latest book, Triage, poet, essayist, and playwright Claudia Rankine explores the devastation in Gaza, Afro-Caribbean womanhood, whiteness, and other themes through the turbulent relationship of the narrator and a nonbinary character called “the theorist.” Rankine will appear at the 2026 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 17-18.
In his latest poetry collection, Dear Mothership, Marcus Wicker lets us chart planet Earth as though we were aliens. Fueled by a lyricism that feels at once like rap, jazz, and funk, these poems consider what it means to be human, seen through an extraterrestrial lens. Wicker will discuss the book at Novel in Memphis on September 8.
In On Witness and Respair, a collection of essays and speeches, Jesmyn Ward deals with beauty and ugliness, dread and hope. Ward will discuss the book at Fisk University in Nashville on May 18.
Brandon Taylor’s readers expect his novels to coalesce around deep philosophical thought. In his latest, Minor Black Figures, ideas about God function as the engine of the book.
Daniel Black’s ninth book, Isaac’s Song, is a novel about Black gay becoming in the 1980s. It dunks us into the colorful life and language of Isaac Swinton, carrying us through recollections of his rigid childhood in Missouri and life in Chicago amidst the AIDS crisis.
Load in Nine Times is Frank X. Walker’s poetic exploration of American life in the period surrounding the Civil War. The collection takes Kentucky as its geographical framework, speaking through enslaved mothers, fathers, and children and masters and mistresses.
