Alice Randall celebrates “black kid-lit greats”
February 25, 2011 Years ago, when Nashville novelist Alice Randall–author, most recently, of Rebel Yell–read bedtime stories to her daughter Caroline, she fielded a lot of questions about the way African-American characters were portrayed in children’s literature:
Read moreThe New York Times profiles Heather Armstrong as she celebrates the tenth anniversary of Dooce
February 24, 2011 Come Sunday, Memphis native Heather Armstrong will have been blogging for ten years. In other words, Armstrong launched Dooce.com long before most Americans had ever heard the word blog, and long, long before the blogosphere upended American politics and recreated the news cycle.
Read morePeter Guralnick’s biography of Elvis is headed for the big screen
February 24, 2011 Screenwriter John Fusco is adapting Peter Guralnick’s 1994 biography, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley, for Fox 2000, reports Deadline New York. The project has been planned for more than a decade but is only just now getting off the ground.
Read moreLybian poet Khaled Mattawa weighs in on the revolution
February 23, 2011 Khaled Mattawa was thirteen when Muammar Gaddafi’s forces began hanging “traitors” in Mattawa’s home city of Benghazi. The next year Mattawa left his native Libya, accompanied only by his eighteen-year-old brother, to move to the U.S., where opportunities were plentiful and dictators were conspicuously absent. Mattawa’s parents and four younger sisters stayed behind. Because of Gaddafi’s suspicion of ex-pats, Mattawa could not return. He didn’t see the rest of his family again for twenty-one years.
Read moreRichard Bausch and Rebecca Skloot are both on the short list for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize awards
February 22, 2011 For several years novelist Richard Bausch and science writer Rebecca Skloot were colleagues at the University of Memphis (though Skloot recently left the program to move to Chicago); now they’ve each been nominated for the 2010 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in their respective categories: Bausch is on the short list for fiction; Skloot’s nomination is in Science and Technology writing.
Read moreMake room, James Dickey; there will soon be a new book on the shelf
February 21, 2011 When they hear the name “Dickey,” literary types in Tennessee automatically think of the brilliant poet James Dickey (though he’s perhaps more famous as the author of the novel Deliverance than as the author of many oft-anthologized poems like “The Heaven of Animals,” “The Lifeguard,” and “Falling”), who was a student at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
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