Daniel Black’s ninth book, Isaac’s Song, is a novel about Black gay becoming in the 1980s. It dunks us into the colorful life and language of Isaac Swinton, carrying us through recollections of his rigid childhood in Missouri and life in Chicago amidst the AIDS crisis.
Bridgett Davis’ second family memoir, Love, Rita, creates a vivid portrait of her sister, a woman of resourcefulness, perseverance, and elegance whose life was cut short by illness and the harmful effects of systemic racism.
Through smoldering honesty and formal inventiveness, the poems in Tiana Clark’s Scorched Earth insist on foregrounding the rough truths that shake loose during times of upheaval. Clark will discuss Scorched Earth at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 5.
Elaine Weiss’ Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement details the network of unofficial schools aimed at helping Black citizens pass literacy tests before the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Weiss will discuss her book at the Nashville Public Library on March 6 and the East Tennessee History Center in Knoxville on May 20.
Patti Callahan Henry’s latest novel, The Story She Left Behind, follows three generations of women through the mystery of a lost language. The author will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 2.
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: When she died in 1960, Zora Neale Hurston left behind a manuscript that tells the story of Oluale Kossola, known in the United States as Cudjo Lewis, the last survivor of the transatlantic slave trade. With editing by Hurston scholar Deborah G. Plant, Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” was published in 2018.
