Author and physicist Alan Lightman’s first children’s book, Ada and the Galaxies, written with Olga Pastuchiv and illustrated by Susanna Chapman, captures a girl’s joy over visiting her grandfather and exploring the star-filled sky over his home on an island in Maine.
Literary and academic institutions in Tennessee have long served as hubs for acclaimed writing, and none more notably than the University of the South, home to The Sewanee Review and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Both organizations are working to elevate a new generation of writers who better reflect the growing diversity of the region and the country.
This year’s Festival will feature 100 authors, offering attendees the opportunity to connect online with their favorite authors from a variety of genres, including nonfiction, poetry, mystery, and more.
From the Chapter 16 archive: Where do babies come from? It may be a child’s question, but the answer is far from simple, especially if we consider the baby-making processes of the whole animal kingdom, as Michael Sims does in his companion to the National Geographic Channel’s television special of the same name, In the Womb: Animals. It features ultrasound images of fetal animals that are so detailed and vivid it’s almost hard to believe they aren’t simulations.
On July 8 at Knoxville’s Lakeshore Park, “Suttree’s Knoxville: A Hymn to the Past in Film & Music” will combine live music, readings from Cormac McCarthy’s novel Suttree, and a film of archival footage to evoke a sense of the city as it was 70 years ago.
Times are hard for the characters who populate William Gay’s Fugitives of the Heart, the last in a string of posthumous novels pieced together by his friends from an attic full of scenes Gay left behind. For J.M. White, Sonny Brewer, and the other writers who figured out how the scenes fit together, the effort was worth it, a forensic labor of love they feel even now for a writer who died in 2012.
