FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Blending poetry and prose, Joy Harjo’s second memoir, Poet Warrior, braids her story of becoming an accomplished poet and modern Native woman — always guided by her ancestors in the Muscogee (Creek) Nation — into the larger context of Native history.
In From Here to the Great Unknown, Lisa Marie Presley and her daughter Riley Keough offer up a memoir filled with details salacious, sorrowful, and deeply sentimental. The story belongs mostly to Presley, the only child of Elvis and Priscilla Presley, and she holds nothing back about her wild and singular life.
In George Masa: A Life Reimagined, Janet McCue and Paul Bonesteel delve into the story of a remarkable artist of the Great Smoky Mountains.
Smoking Guns, an anthology from the East Tennessee chapter of Sisters in Crime, offers a dozen “tales of crime and mystery” that take readers into the dark corners of humanity.
Aaron Robertson’s exacting, poetic The Black Utopians tracks the rise of Black nationalism, skeptical to its core, through a cadre of Detroit activists, knitting their creative and often militant ideas with memoir and his formerly incarcerated father’s letters, centering the question: “What does utopia look like in black?”
James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is a powerful tale of early 20th-century Jewish and African American communities bonding together to protect a disabled orphan. McBride will deliver the Nashville Public Library Foundation Literary Award lecture at Martin Luther King Jr. High School in Nashville on November 9.
