September 27, 2010 Poet Claudia Emerson explored the painful terrain of divorce in her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Late Wife. Her newest collection, Figure Studies, looks at the gender “schooling” of young women and its impact on their lives. She answered questions from Chapter 16 by email prior to her public reading on September 27 at 7 pm. at the University of Tennessee Library in Knoxville.
September 23, 2010 In 2008, Salvatore Scibona’s first novel, The End, was a finalist for the National Book Award—a coup for its author and for its publisher, the tiny, nonprofit Gray Wolf Press. The NBA distinction helped propel sales of the novel, which has become a favorite of book clubs. Scibona’s burgeoning career received another boost in June, when The New Yorker named Scibona to its “20 Under 40” list of young writers who are bringing fresh voices to American fiction. Scibona will read from his work at 7 p.m. on September 23 in Buttrick Hall, Room 102, on the Vanderbilt University campus.
September 21, 2010 Priest and author Becca Stevens is justly celebrated for her social-justice activism: she is the founder of Magdalene, a five-house residential recovery program for prostitutes, and of Thistle Farms, a cottage industry which provides work for women in the Magdalene program. Stevens also helped to replicate the Magdalene formula in cities throughout the South, launch a business for women in Rwanda, found a school in Equador, and establish a nursing program for an AIDS hospice in Botswana. Prior to launching her new books, The Path of Peace, The Path of Justice, and The Path of Love, she talks with Chapter 16 about the intersection of faith, activism, and art. She will discuss her work at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on September 21 at 7 p.m.
September 15, 2010 Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets brings together a group of accomplished writers to discuss the mysterious craft of writing poetry. Poet and Austin Peay professor Blas Falconer, one of the book’s editors, speaks to Chapter 16 about the collection, and about his own creative process.
September 7, 2010 Jeannette Walls’s first bestselling memoir, The Glass Castle, the shocking chronicle of her own hardscrabble years as the child of frequently homeless parents, is considered by many to be a standard-bearer of the genre—and a tough act to follow. But Walls had an equally captivating tale nestled in her family tree. In 2009’s critically acclaimed Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel, she channels her remarkable grandmother’s life in Arizona during the early twentieth century. Jeannette Walls appears at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on September 8 at 6 p.m. and at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on September 9 at 7 p.m.
September 2, 2010 Nashville writer River Jordan is a literary polymath—she’s a playwright, an essayist, and a novelist with four books under her belt—and her range and ambition are remarkable. While her novels all have a kind of dreamy Southern mysticism, her book of “recollections,” called The Deep Down Dirty South, features stories about people who are “tough as nails, terrible in their mightiness—downright frightful survivors of a hard life.” Her newest novel, The Miracle of Mercy Land, tells the story of a young editorial assistant at a Depression-era newspaper in South Alabama who’s privy to the discovery of a magical book. Jordan will read from the book at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on September 7 at 7 p.m.
