September 17, 2010 The Academy of American Poets announced this week that Khaled Mattawa, a graduate of the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, has been awarded the 2010 Academy Fellowship. Awarded once a year “for distinguished poetic achievement,” the fellowship carries a stipend of $25,000.
September 12, 2010 Rebecca Skloot, bestselling author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks recently gave up her position at the University of Memphis to move to Chicago. Today she speaks with the Commercial Appeal‘s Richard Morgan about her years in Memphis and their importance in the creation of a bestseller. Read the story here.
September 2, 2010 Abraham Verghese’s novel, Cutting For Stone, is one of six finalists for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction. The prize carries a $10,000 honorarium and is the “only annual literary award recognizing the power of the written word to promote peace,” according to a website about the awards.
August 30, 2010 Susan Gregg Gilmore was understandably thrilled when NPR reviewer Alan Cheuse called her debut novel, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen, a “stand out” coming-of-age story which gets the recipe for that genre “almost just right.” She was equally understandably less thrilled when he also noted that the book “reads like meringue when you really want pie.”
August 28, 2010 Memphis native Alan Lightman is a scientist and a bestselling author– two roles rarely played by the same person. In an essay for the M.I.T. Communications Forum, he asks a number of questions about the role of experts in the mainstream: “How does the intellectual stand both outside society and inside society? How does the intellectual find common ground between what is of deeply personal and private interest and also what is of public interest?
August 13, 2010 In 1951, a medical researcher at Johns Hopkins took cells from the cervix of Henrietta Lacks, an impoverished Baltimore woman who subsequently died of cancer. It was an age that predated any notion of informed consent, and neither Henrietta nor any member of her family gave permission for doctors to perform research on her tissue sample, which ultimately yielded the first immortal cell line in human history and became the basis for a multibillion-dollar research industry.
