Poet Nikki Giovanni is still speaking her mind
January 17, 2011 Since she first gained attention in the late 1960s with fiery screeds like “The Great Pax Whitie,” Nikki Giovanni has been both one of America’s most popular poets and a cultural leader in the African American community. Now in her fifth decade of literary prominence, Giovanni is still pursuing her craft, her passion for education, and her penchant for speaking her mind.
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Novelist Richard Bausch adds the Dayton Literary Peace Prize to a shelf full of awards
December 23, 2010 When novelist Richard Bausch was a child, his father would tell him about his days in the army, many of them spent slogging alongside hundreds of thousands of other Allied soldiers up the Italian Peninsula during World War II. These weren’t bedtime stories: what was supposed to be a quick conquest took nearly two years to complete, and 60,000 Allied soldiers, 50,000 Germans, and 50,000 Italian soldiers and partisans died in the process. It was the bloodiest theater in Western Europe. One of those stories became the basis for Bausch’s latest novel, Peace, which is dedicated to his father and which won the 2009 Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
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Author-physician Abraham Verghese talks with Chapter 16 about his dual career and his latest novel, Cutting For Stone
December 20, 2010 An accomplished physician and teacher, Abraham Verghese put his life on hold to attend the celebrated Iowa Writers Workshop. Since graduating from the program in 1991, he’s balanced his day job with a writing career, publishing two nonfiction books and contributing to the likes of Esquire and The Atlantic Monthly. In his first novel, Cutting For Stone, Verghese tells the story of Marion Stone, an orphaned twin conceived of an illicit affair between an Indian nun and a dashing but volatile British surgeon. With wise and compelling prose, the epic tale weaves its themes of love, betrayal, forgiveness, and self-sacrifice together with the destinies of a country and a proud yet fractured family. Verghese appears February 26 at noon in 208 Light Hall on the Vanderbilt University campus, and at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on February 27 at 2 p.m.
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Tammy Algood emphasizes seasonality and freshness in The Complete Southern Cookbook, an ambitious collection of the South’s best recipes
November 22, 2010 At a time when bookstore shelves are sagging with glossy, Food Network-style cookbooks, Tammy Algood’s The Complete Southern Cookbook is an anomaly. It contains no stylish pictures or fancy ingredients, no delectable yet impossible-to-pull-off meal plans or fancifully-coiffed celebrity chefs. But what Algood’s book lacks in glitz it makes up for in practicality — which is, after all, what most home chefs really need. In crisp, no-nonsense recipes, Algood takes readers on a virtual tour of the Southern kitchen.
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Poet Reid Ward contemplates life, love, and responsibility from the confines of his “cage”
October 19, 2010 Reid Ward is a preacher’s kid, and like of lot of “PK”s, he’s a natural-born insurgent. During high school, Ward was bright and likeable but not exactly focused on academics. More than anything, he hated his English classes—“I don’t remember ever reading a book all the way through until after high school,” he says. When he was eighteen, Ward fell from the roof of his family home and broke his neck. Paralyzed from the chest down, he ultimately discovered a lifeline in literature. Reid Ward reads from his new poetry collection, The Atrophy of the Sun, at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on October 19 at 7 p.m.
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August 23, 2010 Michael Sims is a nonfiction writer, the author of several books about nature, including In the Womb: Animals (a companion to a National Geographic Channel series, National Geographic Books, 2009); Apollo’s Fire: A Day on Earth in Nature and Imagination (Viking, 2007); Adam’s Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form (Viking, 2003); and Darwin’s Orchestra: An Almanac of Nature in History and the Arts (Henry Holt, 1997). Kingfisher Days is a work-in-progress, Sims’s first effort to write personally about his life and his own experience of nature. His blog of the same name is, he writes, an online “journal about one man’s response—half scientific, half aesthetic, mostly affectionate—to the natural world behind ordinary urban life. Some days I don’t know if I’d rather write a field guide or a poem.”
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