U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón on music, animals, and the chaotic joy of spring
Chapter 16 talks with Ada Limón, a poet whose work is grounded in the physical world, delighting in nature and urging readers toward curiosity and wonder. Limón will appear at Green Door Gourmet Farm in Nashville on May 4.
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Monica Brashears’ debut novel delivers a strange, haunting world
With its reverberations of pain and trauma, Monica Brashears’ debut novel House of Cotton is not for the faint of heart; however, it is lush, gorgeous evidence of a new and decisive talent. Brashears will discuss the book at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 13 and Hodges Library on the University of Tennessee, Knoxville campus on April 17.
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Mary-Alice Daniel’s debut poetry collection interrogates our sense of order
Mary-Alice Daniel’s Mass for Shut-Ins is the winner of the 2022 Yale Younger Poets Prize. The poems in this debut collection ask readers to live inside a porousness of borders, both physical and mental.
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Steve Stern paints a fictional portrait of Chaim Soutine
Steve Stern’s The Village Idiot, a fictionalized account of the life of painter Chaim Soutine, dives into the relationships, politics, and context that shaped his often overlooked masterworks. Stern will appear at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on October 13.
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Ruta Sepetys on her passion for sharing underrepresented history
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: With her latest novel, I Must Betray You, award-winning YA author Ruta Sepetys returns to the difficult task of telling an unfamiliar story from history: the struggles of people living under the brutal Ceaușescu regime in Romania in the late 1980s. Sepetys will appear at the 2022 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 14-16.
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Woman of Light explores the persistence of stories
Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s debut novel, Woman of Light, is about stories — who gets to tell them and which ones survive. Fajardo-Anstine will appear in conversation with Destiny O. Birdsong at Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 6.
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