October 30, 2012
Pulitzer Prize winner David Maraniss has been named Writer in Residence at the Martha Rivers Ingram Commons and the College of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt University. Maraniss will co-teach two courses, Presidential Biographies and Reading and Writing about Sports in American Life. In a Vanderbilt press release, Maraniss says, “I’ll be focusing on subjects that obsess me—the art of biography, presidential politics and the sociology of sports.”
October 19, 2012 Memphis native Steve Stern’s collection of new and selected short stories, The Book of Mischief, has received a warm review in The New York Times.
October 10, 2012 Knuckleballer R.A. Dickey is having what sportswriters call a “streak,” scientists call “critical mass,” and Dickey himself calls a “kairotic moment.” To put it more prosaically, this is R.A. Dickey’s year. “Timing is so important in life, I believe,” Dickey recently wrote to Chapter 16 in an email. “I have really felt that this last year has been the culmination of so many things coming together.”
October 8, 2012 Stanford Medical School professor and The New York Times best-seller list author Abraham Verghese has made his case for the classic but fading image of doctors clad in white coats, their pockets bulging with instruments. Writing online for the “Well” section of The New York Times, Verghese recalls with rich detail the doctors’ bags carried by his early mentors, first when he was a medical student in India and then a resident in Johnson City, Tennessee.
October 1, 2012 Kristen Iversen, who directs the M.F.A. program in creative writing at the University of Memphis, continues to gather praise for her memoir, Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats.
September 28, 2012 Sewanee graduate John Jeremiah Sullivan is back in the news, thanks to a cover story for The New York Times Magazine and the British publication of his essay collection, Pulphead. In “Behind the Cover Story”, an online interview, Sullivan discusses his research for “Where Is Cuba Going?”.
