Q & A

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.

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.

December 21, 2010 By the time Knopf announced last winter—in an open letter to booksellers by legendary editor Gary Fisketjon, no less—that it would launch Nashville novelist Adam Ross’s debut book, Mr. Peanut, with a print run of 60,000 copies, and that it would be published in fourteen countries, chatter in the book world had already begun. The book officially hit shelves in June, by which time the chatter had grown to a roar, with Michiko Kakutani calling it “dark, dazzling” and Ross himself “an audacious new writer.” Ross took time to discuss his novel with Chapter 16 before the launch event at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville.