FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: In A Better Life for Their Children, photographer Andrew Feiler explores the history of the Rosenwald Schools, a collaboration between Booker T. Washington and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald that brought education to thousands of Black children in the segregated South. Feiler’s photographs are featured in an exhibition at the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville through May 21.
In three recent poetry collections by Tennessee authors, moments of internal reckoning take center stage. Katherine Smith’s Secret City, Darius Stewart’s Intimacies in Borrowed Light, and Tyler Friend’s Him or Her or Whatever all foreground highly subjective perspectives in resonant conflict with the world around them.
In De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s Decent People, a woman hopes to retire quietly in her North Carolina hometown only to find it convulsed by a triple murder. Winslow will appear at the SouthWord Literary Festival in Chattanooga on April 14-15.
Black Folk Could Fly, a volume of selected writings by the late Randall Kenan, explores the many aspects of African American life in the South.
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Nashville author Andrea Williams formerly worked in marketing and development for the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. Her wide knowledge of the subject is evident in her first book for young readers, Baseball’s Leading Lady: Effa Manley and the Rise and Fall of the Negro Leagues, an account of the only woman in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Dr. Yasmine S. Ali’s Walk Through Fire: The Train Disaster That Changed America creates a gripping drama about dark days in her hometown’s history. Ali will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 27, the Humphreys County Public Library in Waverly on March 3, the Dickson County Public Library on March 9, and the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville on April 8.
