Features

October 11, 2013 It’s time again for the Southern Festival of Books, and I can’t wait. My students tease that I’ll tailgate the night before. I might actually do it. Celebrating its twenty-fifth year, the three-day festival will be a real homecoming for readers and writers alike. The Southern Festival of Books will be held at Legislative Plaza in Nashville today through Sunday. Click here for a schedule of 2013 festival sessions and here for a complete list of participating authors. All events at the Southern Festival of Books are free and open to the public. No reservations are required.

September 27, 2013 The third annual Bookstock festival will showcase forty Memphis-area authors representing multiple genres: fiction, poetry, current affairs, children’s books, and more. This free, family-friendly event, which features talks, book signings, live music, cooking demonstrations, and assorted activities for children, will be held at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library in Memphis on October 5, 2013, from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. The keynote speech will be delivered by counterterrorism expert Philip Mudd, author of Takedown: Inside the Hunt for Al Qaeda.

September 4, 2013 On September 28, 2013, The Writer’s Loft at MTSU in Murfreesboro will sponsor a new opportunity for aspiring writers in the mid-state: the first annual Middle Tennessee Writers’ Conference. Celebrated novelist Kevin Wilson will give the keynote address, and other speakers booked for the day-long event include nonfiction writer Holly Tucker, poet Bill Brown, fiction writer Linda Busby Parker, and playwright Claudia Barnett. Registration is open to the public through September 10.

June 28, 2013 Two of Tennessee’s most senior nonfiction authors, Will D. Campbell and John Egerton, reached the close of a half-century of companionship this month when Campbell died from complications of a stroke on June 3, 2013. At a memorial service on June 22 at St. Stephen Catholic Community in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, Egerton eulogized his friend and “fellow writer of rare books” with this remembrance.

June 21, 2013 Tennessee writers have garnered a host of awards and honors in recent months. Chapter 16 runs down the list of prizewinners: Richard Bausch, Kate Daniels, Margaret Lazarus Dean, David Haskell, Silas House, Kristen Iversen, Jane Landers, Ann Patchett, Katherine Paterson, and Daniel Sharfstein.