Step Aside for the Talking Dog
September 27, 2012 In the current issue of The New Yorker, Nashvillian Tony Earley takes Jack from “Jack and the Beanstalk” on a wild new adventure, pitting him against a stubborn dog guarding a bridge.
News & Notes
New Honors for Graves
September 26, 2012 Johnson City poet Jesse Graves continues to rack up honors for his first poetry collection, Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine. Last week, Graves won the Appalachian Writers Association Book of the Year Award. Graves will receive the award at the Southern Appalachian Culture Festival at Gardner-Webb University in Boiling Springs, North Carolina.
Literary Olympians
September 17, 2012 To celebrate the 2012 Olympics. the BBC National Short Story Award has this year become the BBC International Short Story Award, and Nashville’s Adam Ross is the only U.S. author to make the shortlist. The finalists were announced in a live BBC broadcast on Friday. Ross’s story, “In the Basement,” appears in Ladies and Gentlemen, a short-story collection just released in paperback.
A New Editor for the Oxford American
September 11, 2012 During its twenty-year history, the Oxford American has become famous for two things: brilliant writing and recurrent turmoil. Founded by editor Marc Smirnoff in 1992, the literary magazine has always struggled to maintain solvency, shutting down more than once, seemingly for good, only to be revived again months later when Smirnoff somehow managed, against all odds, to secure more funding.
In Vilnius
September 7, 2012 Novelist Steve Stern grew up in Memphis, though not in the Pinch– an old Memphis neighborhood that is often the setting for Stern’s fiction and was once the city’s Jewish ghetto. Stern was in his mid-thirties when he returned to Memphis, after more than a decade away, to work in a Memphis folklore center and discovered the Pinch. The Yiddish culture and stories he found there gave him the focus and material he needed to write.
Penning an Award Winner
August 30, 2012 Prolific children’s author and Nashville native Patricia McKissack has been honored for her picture book Never Forgotten. The PEN American Center recently awarded McKissack the PEN/Steven Kroll award, which, according to the PEN website, “acknowledge[s] the distinct literary contributions of picture book writers.”
