News & Notes

February 21, 2011 When former Harrogate, Tennessee, novelist Silas House joined legendary Kentucky poet and essayist Wendell Berry and twelve other protesters outside Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear’s office, he didn’t pack pajamas, but he came to stay the night. The protesters hoped the sit-in would call media attention to the environmental and human devastation caused by mountaintop-removal mining, a practice which House has long worked to see ended.

February 10, 2011 Like many girls in the mountains of East Tennessee, including her own mother, novelist Amy Greene married young and had a baby soon thereafter. But her story does not feature the failed dreams or tragic unhappiness many readers might expect. Instead, Greene remains the happily married mother of two children, and her novel, Bloodroot, was one of the most highly acclaimed books of 2010.

February 7, 2011 Poet Marilyn Kallet, director of the creative-writing program at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, will once again host a poetry workshop in Auvillar, France. The program runs May 14 through May 21 at the Brune gîte, a luxury bed and breakfast in a 12th century village that is, according to Kallet, “one of the hundred most beautiful villages in France.” Read more about this unique program here. Two partial scholarships, as well as a number of discounts, are available.

February 4, 2011 Thanks to enormous pre-publication buzz, former Memphis writer Rebecca Skloot had a bestseller on her hands within a day of launching The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, her nonfiction book about the woman behind the first immortal cell line in medical history. But unlike the pharmaceutical companies who owe many of their most successful drugs to research involving HeLa cells, Skloot was determined from the beginning to make sure that the descendants of Henrietta Lacks would benefit from her own windfall.