The Homeplace on the Plaza
The Southern Festival of Books is the place I came from and the place I return to, and it is the place where my literary forebears live on through the miraculous immortality of books.
Features
In That Sacred Space and Sound
WordStream: The Weekly Writer’s Voice, a reading series launched earlier this year in Knoxville, provides a stage for an exciting array of writers and performers. The show is recorded live each Friday on the WDVX Stage at the Knoxville Visitors Center.
Looking Forward to the Festival
Humanities Tennessee today released its lineup of award-winning, bestselling authors who will headline the 31st annual Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville on October 11-13. The roster includes Samantha Power, Ann Patchett, Ottessa Moshfegh, Pico Iyer, Paul Theroux, Saeed Jones, Casey Cep, Dani Shapiro, and Derrick Barnes, among many others.
Teaching and Unteaching—and Entertaining All the Way
As she was coming of age in Nashville in the 1950s, there were many places award-winning children’s author Patricia McKissack was not allowed to go. She remembers hotels and restaurants that forbade African Americans entry, and movie theaters with a separate doorway in the alley for black patrons. The farthest reaches of the Grand Ole Opry’s balcony, known as the buzzard’s roost, was the only seating open to African Americans, McKissack recalls. She never partook: “My grandfather said that watermelons would bloom in January if any of his children went down there. ‘We don’t sit in no buzzard’s roost,’ he said. ‘We’re human beings, not buzzards.'”
A Faith that Left Room for Doubt
Dayton, Tenn., author Rachel Held Evans, whose books challenged the evangelical teachings of her childhood and urged conservative Christians to make their churches more compassionate and more inclusive, died on Saturday after a short illness.
Believing in the Power of the Heart
When my agent asked to see a complete revision of my work-in-progress, I didn’t know whether I could face it again. As with that tangle of cords and cables you stash in the back of your closet just in case you’ll need them, even though you’re not sure what half of them are for, I feared that if I pulled on one cord, the others would tighten into a death knot. How would I ever rewrite the whole book and hand it in on time? Fortunately, I had a plan: I’d apply to Rockvale Writers’ Colony.
