Book Excerpt: Nine Bar Blues
Sheree Renée Thomas is an award-winning short story writer, poet, and editor. She edited the Dark Matter speculative fiction anthologies, which won two World Fantasy Awards. Her previous books include Sleeping Under the Tree of Life and Shotgun Lullabies. Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future is her first fiction collection. She lives in her hometown, Memphis.
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Patti Smith chronicles her idiosyncratic path through the creative life in Year of the Monkey
As evidenced by the travels depicted her most recent memoir, Year of the Monkey, Patti Smith has embodied the nomadic spirit of the public troubadour for decades. Whether she’s performing riotous sets with her band or working side by side with literary lights, Smith has forged a role in our arts culture unlike any other.
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A writer measures her life by October weekends at the Southern Festival of Books
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.
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WordStream, a Knoxville-based reading series, showcases an exciting cross section of writers
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.
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Humanities Tennessee announces the lineup for its 31st annual Southern Festival of Books
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.
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For more than three decades, Patricia McKissack has been writing children’s books that bring to life the stories, and the truth, of her ancestors
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.'”
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