This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Pulitzer Prizes, and Humanities Tennessee has received a grant from the Pulitzer organization to celebrate the centennial by highlighting past prizewinners from our state. With the gift of that special funding, Chapter 16 has commissioned a set of essays by prominent writers who will focus on why each Pulitzer-winning work has stood the test of time, or on what it has to say to us today.
These won’t be scholarly works so much as personal meditations by working writers–or, in one case, by a working public servant–on the literature that has so enriched the past literary life of Tennessee. Beginning on Friday of this week and running for ten consecutive Fridays, look for essays by Amy Greene (on A Death in the Family by James Agee), Nikki Giovanni (on Roots by Alex Haley), Dolen Perkins-Valdez and Congressman Jim Cooper (on All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren), Adam Ross (on Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams), Beverly Lowry (on The Road by Cormac McCarthy), Bobby Rogers (on Black Zodiac by Charles Wright), Kate Daniels (on Now and Then: Poems by Robert Penn Warren), Ken Vickers (on The Store by T. S. Stribling, and Ed Tarkington (on A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor). We are very excited about this chance to celebrate the rich literary tradition of Tennessee with the words of writers who are creating the literature of our own age.
For more updates on Tennessee authors, please visit Chapter 16’s News & Notes page, here.
