Love and Hurt
Combining poetry, commentary, and memoir, The Wheel is the first book by Nashville writer and musician AM Ringwalt. Ringwalt will discuss The Wheel at a virtual event hosted by The Porch in Nashville on March 5 at 6 p.m. CST.
Book Excerpt
“Before You Told Me”
Shuly Xóchitl Cawood’s Trouble Can Be So Beautiful at the Beginning won the 2019 Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry. Cawood is the author of the memoir The Going and Goodbye, the inspirational little book 52 Things I Wish I Could Have Told Myself When I Was 17, and the short story collection A Small Thing to Want. She lives in Johnson City. She’ll appear with Ciona Rouse and Larry Thacker at a virtual event hosted by East Tennessee State University on March 3.
You’re Gonna Talk about This Chicken
Rachel Louise Martin’s Hot, Hot Chicken: A Nashville Story recounts the story of hot chicken and what the dish’s growing popularity reveals about race relations in a changing city. Hot, Hot Chicken will be published by Vanderbilt University Press in March 2021.
“Caretaker”
Gaylord Brewer is a professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro. His books include a cookbook-memoir, The Poet’s Guide to Food, Drink, & Desire, and Worship the Pig, from which this poem is excerpted.
“February in Knoxville”
Erin Elizabeth Smith is the creative director at Sundress Academy for the Arts and the managing editor of Sundress Publications. Down is her third full-length poetry collection. Her poems have appeared in Guernica, Ecotone, Mid-American, Tupelo Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, and Willow Springs, among others. She is a Distinguished Lecturer in the English department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and in 2017 she was inducted into the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame.
“You, Reader”
Major Jackson is the author of five volumes of poetry, including Roll Deep and Leaving Saturn, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. In January 2021, he will join the Vanderbilt University faculty as Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English.
