February 29, 2012 “Black history is not just politics and arts and athletics,” writes Nashville novelist Alice Randall in a new essay for The Huffington Post; it’s also “sweet potatoes and peanuts. It’s taste and bellies and bodies. It’s all the recipes for survival that appear in cookbooks written by Black American authors.”
February 27, 2012 John Jeremiah Sullivan, a Sewanee grad and the author of critically acclaimed essay collection Pulphead, writes nonfiction of the variety generally classified as New Journalism. In reporting on a subject, he also interacts with it—talking with the locals and describing the landscape, of course, but also remembering episodes in his own life which bear on the telling of the new tale at hand.
February 24, 2012 Novelist William Gay died at his home in Hohenwald, Tennessee, last night, at age sixty-eight. Among the most critically acclaimed of his generation of Southern writers, Gay began his public writing career famously late, when, at age fifty-five, his first short story was published in The Georgia Review. His first novel, The Long Home, won the James A. Michener Memorial Prize and was named a New York Times Notable Book for 1999. He followed that success with another novel, Provinces of Night, a short-story collection, I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, and a third novel, Twilight.
February 23, 2012 Two Nashvillians, one current and one former, are among the finalists for the 2012 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. Robert K. Massie is honored in the biography category for Catherine the Great. Holly Tucker is the author of Blood Work, which is shortlisted in science and technology. The winner will be announced at a gala in Los Angeles on April 20.
February 22, 2012 Charlotte Pence, a Knoxville poet and Chapter 16 contributing writer, has been shortlisted for the prestigious Crashaw Prize, an international award for debut poetry collections written in English. The award, offered by the British house Salt Publishing, is designed to seek out and publish “debut collections of poetry from major new talents.” Pence, a recent Ph.D. graduate of the University of Tennessee’s creative-writing program, is one of thirteen finalists.
February 21, 2012 If independent booksellers had anything to say about it, Ann Patchett would be canonized. Last month, when she told the story of how she came to open Parnassus Books in Nashville, the Patron Saint of Bookstores got a standing ovation from a packed audience at the Winter Institute of the American Booksellers Association.
