A Shared Space, a Holy Ground
“I’ve missed the Southern Festival of Books only twice since its founding twenty-eight years ago, and I carry with me many of the voices I first heard there. They are a witness to the shared lives of so many who’ve gone before us, and their voices—their testimonies—remind us as writers and readers to carry on, to keep adding new voices to this celebration.” Poet Jeff Hardin kicks off the Southern Festival of Books, which runs today through Sunday at Nashville’s Legislative Plaza. Festival events are free and open to the public.
Salvage the Bones, a National Book Award winner, is the featured title for this year’s Memphis Reads program, and author Jesmyn Ward will be in Memphis to discuss the novel, which is narrated by a pregnant fifteen-year-old whose destitute family faces the arrival of Hurricane Katrina. Ward will speak at Christian Brothers University on September 28 at 7 p.m., and at Rhodes College on September 29 at 6 p.m.
Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff’s third novel, was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in fiction. Groff will be among seventy writers at the 2016 Mid-South Book Festival, held in Memphis September 9-11, 2016. Today she speaks with Chapter 16 about marriage, the trials of portraying anger and death in fiction, and the pleasures of writing in longhand.
With the run-up to the 2016 Southern Festival of Books now officially underway, it’s a good time to remember the festival of 2015.
July 8, 2016 In the last of a nine-essay series commemorating the centennial year of the Pulitzer Prizes, scholar Kenneth W. Vickers considers the lasting significance of T.S. Stribling, the first Tennessee writer to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
July 1, 2016 In the eighth of a nine-essay series commemorating the centennial year of the Pulitzer Prizes, Bobby C. Rogers remembers his teacher, Charles Wright, and Black Zodiac, the book that finally won Wright a Pulitzer Prize in 1998.