Big Men on Campus
In How College Presidents Succeed, Michael Nelson extracts wisdom from three generations of a family known as “Virginia’s academic dynasty.”
Q & A
Discovering the Soil All Over Again
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: When he died in January 2022, historian John Rice Irwin was described as the “guardian of Appalachia’s past.” In a 2008 interview, he talked with poet Jesse Graves about his family and his life’s work.
Red Horizons
In an ever-tilting time of political unrest, ecoclimate crises, and unstable concepts of the future, poet Larry D. Thacker envisions a different world in his latest poetry collection, New Red Words.
Honoring Grief, History, and Family
Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, a food memoir by former Kentucky Poet Laureate Crystal Wilkinson, offers a banquet of voices, memories, imagination, and archival photographs. Wilkinson will be the nonfiction workshop leader at this year’s Tremont Writers Conference in Townsend on October 22-26.
Lost Causes
Confederate Sympathies analyzes the Civil War and its aftermath in the South by weaving histories of literature, politics, and sexuality. Its author, Andrew Donnelly, will be in conversation with Eva Payne at Novel in Memphis on April 28.
A Colorful Cast of Characters
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Everything That’s Beautiful by Tennessee playwright Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder gets its world premiere tonight at New Conservatory Theatre Center in San Francisco. Crisp dialogue and poignant characterization mark the script, which follows a family struggling to start over for the sake of their transgender child.
