July 12, 2010 This afternoon at 4 p.m. EDT, nonfiction author Michael Sims will be interviewed live on the National Public Radio program Here On Earth. He will discuss his new anthology, Dracula’s Guest: A Connoisseur’s Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories and what he learned, in researching the book, about the natural history of vampires.
July 9, 2010 Morgan Entrekin, a Nashville native and the publisher of Grove/Atlantic Inc. in New York, has been named to PEN American Center’s board of directors. This nonprofit is the U.S. affiliate—and largest branch—of PEN International, “the world’s oldest literary and human rights organization,” according to the PEN American website. PEN is perhaps best known for its annual high-profile literary prizes, which include the PEN/Faulkner Award and the PEN/O. Henry Prize.
July 7, 2010 This has been a big week for Alice Randall, Adam Ross, Michael Sims, and Steve Stern, who are being featured in publications as diverse—and as geographically far-flung—as The New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, and Garden & Gun.
July 2, 2010 On Tuesday, in the fourth stop on his book tour in support of Mr. Peanut, Adam Ross landed at the legendary Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi—arguably the Holy Land of Southern Literature—where, according to the store’s blog, he made an unprecedented impression: “Writers have been speaking and reading at Square Books for thirty years, and we’ve heard just about everything, it would seem. But we’d never heard a reading like this. When Mr. Ross finished, a stunned audience sat speechlessly, then broke into loud applause.” The post concluded: “Today it feels, as it shall in days to come, like an ‘I was there’ moment.”
July 1, 2010 Knoxville writer Katie Allison Granju wrote the book on parenting. Specifically, she’s co-author of Attachment Parenting: Instinctive Care for Your Baby and Young Child, which in 1999 made “co-sleeping” and “baby-wearing” household terms, and she’s written on the subject for a wide variety of national publications, including The New York Times, Salon, and Babble. When Granju’s 18-year-old son Henry died on May 31 of a brutal beating he sustained during a drug deal gone wrong, every parent who heard the story was forced to face the same thought: “If this could happen to Katie Allison Granju, it could happen to me.”
June 30, 2010 Today and tomorrow, Macy’s customers across Tennessee can pay three dollars for a coupon that offers ten dollars off the cost of a fifty-dollar purchase. More importantly, that three-dollar investment goes into the coffers of the national office of Reading Is Fundamental , the largest literacy nonprofit in the U.S., which in turn gives one dollar back to the local RIF chapter. Last year alone, the campaign raised $3.1 million and provided 800,000 kids with 2.5 million books.
