September 15, 2011 Katori Hall, a 29-year-old playwright from Memphis, has suddenly found herself not just Broadway-bound but also part of an historic moment for the Great White Way: Hall’s play, The Mountaintop, will be performed during the same season as new work by two other African-American women, Lydia R. Diamond and Suzan-Lori Parks.
September 9, 2011 Michael Sims, a Crossville native, has already written four books of nonfiction and edited (as well as carefully annotated) five collections of short fiction (plus one collection of comic verse), but he shows no signs of slowing his output, much less resting on his laurels. Today Publisher’s Weekly announced another two-book deal for Sims with Walker & Company.
September 5, 2011 Every bookstore owner in this country can tell the same story: a customer comes in to look around, studies a table display of nonfiction releases on the anniversary of some historical event, thumbs through a cookbook or three, reads the backs of a few new mysteries. Maybe she asks the bookseller if her favorite writer has a new novel coming out any time soon, or what book she could buy for a kid who loved Eragon but shrugged at The Hunger Games. Then, when it’s time to leave, she thanks the bookseller graciously, whips out her smart phone and, right there in the store, places an order at Amazon, before she forgets the names of the books she’s picked out. She has spent an hour in her local bookstore—and not a single dime.
August 31, 2011 Every fall, Poets & Writers magazine releases a comprehensive listing of the fifty best (and most applied-to) M.F.A. programs in the nation. The rankings depend on factors like the quality of the faculty, available funding, fellowship and job-placement opportunities, and selectivity. The issue also includes information about each school’s application fee, teaching load, and the surrounding area’s cost of living. Two related articles list twenty-five honorable-mention M.F.A. programs and the top fifteen doctoral programs in creative writing.
August 29, 2011 Poets are the literary artists who live and die by the use metaphor, but in an op-ed piece for The New York Times yesterday, novelist Ann Patchett manages to find some startling connections, too. It’s not every writer who can make a convincing case for the links between bookstores and a) periodic cicadas, b) platform shoes, c) Newt Gingrich, and d) Pete Seeger songs, but Patchett pulls it off, and all as part of an argument that bookstores are making a comeback, too:
August 26, 2011 Chattanooga novelist Susan Gregg Gilmore, a Nashville native, spent her childhood summers in Ringgold, Georgia, visiting her paternal grandparents. The tiny town and its indomitable residents made such an impression on Gilmore that she set her first novel, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen, there. When a tornado savaged Ringgold on April 27, Gilmore looked for ways to help.
