Q & A | Chapter 16

Starting with a Footnote

By Susannah Felts

February 2, 2011

February 2, 2011 Wilberforce University, near Xenia, Ohio, is one of the nation’s oldest historically black universities, the first to be owned and operated by African Americans. Behind its founding in 1863 is a fascinating yet all-but-forgotten piece of history: the school stands on what was once the site of Tawawa Resort, a place where Southern slaveholders vacationed, often in the company of their enslaved mistresses. It’s this setting that Dolen Perkins-Valdez imagines as the backdrop for her engrossing debut novel, Wench, which Publishers’ Weekly called “heart-wrenching, intriguing, original and suspenseful.”

The Past at Present

By Paul McCoy

January 27, 2011

January 27, 2011 Novelist Robert Hicks was standing in the McGavock family parlor of Carnton Plantation, talking about Carnton Plantation: Where the Old South Died, when an antique clock struck. Hicks fell silent as three distinct metallic chimes drifted through the stately chambers of the home. “You see? Right there,” he said. “Imagine this parlor in November of 1864 and the hundreds of wounded lying here, in the halls, in the bedrooms. The sound of that clock. Every hour on the hour. That’s a sound they would have heard.”

Her Postage Stamp of Native Soil

By Susannah Felts

January 24, 2011

January 24, 2011 Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, the setting of Jesmyn Ward’s debut novel, Where the Line Bleeds, is a tiny town nestled in the swampy, piney depths of the Gulf Coast, where few leave and solid jobs are fewer still. It is a world that Ward, currently writer-in-residence at Ole Miss, knows intimately. Her deep empathy for the people of this place, and her attentiveness to its landscape, make the book a stirring, evocative portrait of two brave young African-American men who ask for little beyond the love and support of their maternal grandmother, Ma-mee. Ward will read at the Hodges Library on the University of Tennessee’s Knoxville campus on January 25 at 7 p.m.

The Love Song of Jericho Brown

By Fernanda Moore

January 19, 2011

January 19, 2011 Jericho Brown’s poetry affects the reader like a song that’s impossible to shake; his beautiful lyrics read like music, hitting the subconscious in the same direct and soul-inspiring way. Brown will read from his work at the Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center on the Vanderbilt University campus on January 20 at 7 p.m.

Leaving the Whole World Blind

By Paul V. Griffith

January 12, 2011

January 12, 2011 In their essay collection, Tennessee’s New Abolitionists, editors Amy L. Sayward and Margaret Vandiver document efforts to halt capital punishment in Tennessee. In an email interview with Chapter 16, Vandiver, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Memphis, weighs in on the future of capital punishment in the Volunteer State. Vandiver and contributor Pete Gathje, a professor of Christian ethics at Memphis Theological Seminary, will read from Tennessee’s New Abolitionists at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on January 15 at 1 p.m.

Connecting the Landscape with the Quiet of the Sky

By Margaret Renkl

December 22, 2010

December 22, 2010 Amy Greene’s first novel—a multigenerational epic called Bloodroot—is getting the kind of attention that most debut novelists can only dream about, garnering reviews in publications as far-flung as The Boston Gobe and Entertainment Weekly. Greene found time in her eighteen-city tour to answer a few questions from Chapter 16.