News & Notes

November 28, 2011 From the beginning, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men–the masterpiece of poetry, photography, and reporting by Knoxville-born writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans–was controversial. During the summer of 1936, the two men book spent four weeks with three families of tenant farmers in Hale County, Alabama, researching and photographing their subsistence-level scramble to survive the Great Depression.

November 7, 2011 Michael Sims must be getting used to rave reviews. Following a summer of praise for The Story of Charlotte’s Web: E.B. White’s Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic, now in its third printing, Sims is already earning accolades for his next book.

November 2, 2011 At Chapter 16 we extend our heartiest congratulations to Will Campbell, who has been named the Tennessee Writers Alliance 2011 Literary Legend, and to Bill Brown, the 2011 Writer of the Year. According to the TWA’s website,

Since 2006, the Tennessee Writers Alliance has been recognizing writers through two awards, the Tennessee Writer of the Year Award and the Tennessee Literary Legend Award. The purpose of these awards, each given annually, is to recognize writers who have contributed to the literary heritage of the state.

November 1, 2011 An aspiring novelist in need of cheering up has two options for inspiration, and which one works best depends on the struggling scribe’s age. Young writers take heart from the stories of novelists whose first books were rejected by literary agents an outrageous number of times before finally being published and shooting instantly to the top of the bestseller lists (c.f. The Help by Kathryn Stockett, rejected sixty times). Writers well past the first bloom of youth, however, tend to have retired any crazy dreams of riding to wealth and fame on the back of a bestseller. If you’ve been writing in lonely obscurity for decades, the inspirational tales you collect tend to feature noble geniuses who never, ever give up, who slog on despite the the derision of family members and the indifference of agents, and who are eventually discovered by a visionary editor, finally seeing print sometime in middle age or later—older than you, at least.