July 1, 2014 While recognizing that there are multiple Souths and “as many ways to be black as there are black people,” Zandria Robinson of the University of Memphis works to understand the multiple ways in which black people perform and make use of a Southern identity in their daily lives.
June 30, 2014 Adrianne Harun is on the faculty of the Sewanee School of Letters, which convenes June 8 to July 18 at The University of the South. Her debut novel, A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain, is an unflinching tale of poverty colored with a trace of magical realism.
June 25, 2014 Middle-aged Grace Conley shakes up her life and her family when she suddenly decides to buy a bed-and-breakfast in East Tennessee. In Lin Stepp’s sixth Smoky Mountain novel, Down By the River, Grace learns to follow her own dreams while discovering a reinvigorated religious faith and perhaps even romance. Lin Stepp will appear at Barnes & Noble Booksellers in Brentwood on June 28, 2014, at 1 p.m.
June 23, 2014 To create their new epistolary memoir, Yours for Eternity: A Love Story on Death Row, Damien Echols and Lorri Davis revisited the thousands of letters they exchanged between 1996 and 2011 while Echols was imprisoned as one of the falsely accused West Memphis Three.
June 19, 2014 Jon Sealy’s debut novel is an impressive tale of country noir set against the backdrop of Prohibition. Sealy will discuss The Whiskey Baron at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on June 23, 2014, at 6 p.m.
June 18, 2014 Without violating the spirit of the folktale, Tracy Barrett reinvents the Cinderella story with a sensibility that is distinctly modern. In The Stepsister’s Tale, female independence and solidarity matter far more than male gallantry, but the romance and hopeful essence of the original remain. Barrett will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 24, 2014, at 6:30 p.m.
