News & Notes

June 2, 2014 Brad Thor routinely hits the top of the bestseller lists with immensely popular spy novels featuring counterterrorism agent Scott Horvath. The tech-savvy writer stays connected to his fans via social media, so it’s no surprise that he recently chose to make a big announcement via Twitter: he is moving to Nashville from Chicago, citing high crime and taxes as his primary reasons for leaving Illinois.

May 1, 2014 Earlier this week, we told you about Anita Norman, winner of the Tennessee state Poetry Out Loud finals. Now we’re here to report that Norman, a junior at Arlington High School near Memphis, has been awarded first place in the national championship held this week in Washington, D.C.

April 30, 2014 As he ends his year as a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, Nashville novelist Adam Ross has just received another prestigious appointment: he’ll be in the 2014-2015 class of Berlin Prize Fellows.

April 22, 2014 We won’t condescend to Elizabeth Spencer by counting her age (which is ninety-two) as the most extraordinary element of her recent productivity. Any working writer of any age would live for years like the one Spencer is having, which includes a prestigious award and a critically acclaimed new collection of stories, slyly titled Starting Over.

April 21, 2014 While the book world is consumed with questions about its future, it seems important to take a step back now and again and remind ourselves that what really matters, more than anything, is that there are people in this world with stories to tell, and that we are here to pay attention. There are arguably few writers in the last decade who have done more to adhere to this code than John Jeremiah Sullivan.

April 2, 2014 Alan Lightman is the highly acclaimed author of plays, poems, novels, and essays—and he’s working on a memoir about his Memphis childhood—so it is not surprising that the recent run of calamitous weather would inspire him to write a literary meditation on the relationship between human beings and the natural world.