The ideal of the public defender evolved over the course of 20th-century America, as Sara Mayeux describes in Free Justice. Mayeux, who has a Ph.D. in history and a law degree from Stanford University, is a law professor at Vanderbilt University.
In a wide-ranging interview with Chapter 16, music journalist and biographer Peter Guralnick recalls some of his most famous subjects, from Solomon Burke to Johnny Cash, and explains why the longest piece in his new collection of profiles, Looking to Get Lost, “was the story I felt I had to write.”
Nashville-based science writer Amanda Little talks with Chapter 16 about The Fate of Food, the result of five years of research in 15 countries. A paperback edition of the book has just been released.
In haunting lyric poems and traditional narratives, Jesse Graves’ Merciful Days shows us the ‘ghost-lives’ that shaped the boy learning the rough language of cows and that imprint the returning adult who walks the fence line now without his father. Graves talks with Chapter 16 about the experiences and influences that inform his work.
Robert Gordon’s It Came From Memphis celebrates wild times and transformative music by shining a light on the likes of Furry Lewis, Mud Boy and the Neutrons, Big Star, disc jockey Dewey Phillips, and wrestler Sputnik Monroe.
Toi Derricotte’s “I”: New and Selected Poems spans over four decades of work by a poet unparalleled in the tenderness and honesty with which she writes about the self, trauma, and memory. She unpacks race, gender, sexuality, class, violence, motherhood, and more, with rich detail and incantatory music.
