Book Excerpt: The Comfort of Crows
Margaret Renkl’s The Comfort of Crows is a literary devotional that moves through a year of beauty, joy, and grief in the teeming natural world of Renkl’s own backyard. The book includes 52 original color artworks by Billy Renkl and will be published by Spiegel & Grau in October 2023.
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A writer measures her life by October weekends at the Southern Festival of Books
The Southern Festival of Books is the place I came from and the place I return to, and it is the place where my literary forebears live on through the miraculous immortality of books.
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Rachel Held Evans, author of four books on progressive Christianity, has died at 37
Dayton, Tenn., author Rachel Held Evans, whose books challenged the evangelical teachings of her childhood and urged conservative Christians to make their churches more compassionate and more inclusive, died on Saturday after a short illness.
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Mary Gauthier talks with Chapter 16 about becoming your own witness
While touring to support Rifles and Rosary Beads, her new album co-written with American veterans, Nashville songwriter Mary Gauthier signed a book deal with St. Martin’s Press to tell her own story of trauma and recovery.
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Editor Adam Ross talks with Chapter 16 about the 500th issue of The Sewanee Review
This fall marks the publication of the 500th issue of The Sewanee Review and a full year of issues under Adam Ross’s leadership. Today the Nashville novelist talks with Chapter 16 about how the past informs the present—and influences the future—at the oldest literary magazine in the country.
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Billy Collins, former poet laureate, talks with Chapter 16 about why we’re all born for poetry—and how school kills it for kids
Billy Collins is a frequent guest on National Public Radio shows like A Prairie Home Companion and Fresh Air, and his readings pack even halls that seat two thousand people or more. Collins will read from his new collection, The Rain in Portugal, at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music on October 26 at 6:15 p.m.
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