News & Notes

April 18, 2012 Chris Scott, who has written book reviews and conducted author interviews for Chapter 16 since the site was launched in 2009, and who reviewed books for the Nashville Scene for years before that, is also both a geologist by day and an aspiring novelist by night (and by weekends, and by vacation days). The book Scott has recently finished revising, Written in Stone, is a novel of suspense that combines the science he conducts by day and the writing he does by night. It is also a quarterfinalist for the 2012 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award.

April 16, 2012 Amid the many books and articles commemorating the anniversary of the date the “unsinkable” Titanic sank to the floor of the Atlantic ocean a hundred years ago, Memphis native Hampton sides got perhaps the most visually arresting assignment of the bunch: in a cover story for the April issue of National Geographic, Sides describes the way technology has changed what we know about the ship.

April 13, 2012 Chapter 16 readers know Ashley Judd as the author of a memoir, All That is Bitter & Sweet, and as an advocate for children with AIDS and victims of sexual violence. Nashville readers know her as Naomi’s daughter and Wynnona’s little sister. But to the rest of the world, Ashley Judd is a celebrity, an award-winning actor who’s had leading roles in films like Smoke, Kiss The Girls, and De-Lovely. And because she’s a celebrity, star rags and bloggers have always felt entitled to comment on (read scathingly criticize) her appearance. But Judd’s not taking it any more.

April 4, 2012 Organizers of Killer Nashville, the annual conference for readers and aspiring writers, has launched a new blog, “A Killer Conversation: an online community of readers and writers of mysteries, thrillers, suspense, and true crime.” In addition to the daily posts by Killer Nashville staff, the blog will each Wednesday feature a new post by a bestselling author or forensics expert. The series kicks off with Nashville’s own Jennie Bentley, a New York Times bestselling novelist who writes candidly about her own writer-for-hire experience:

March 26, 2012 Political commentators keep expressing astonishment that the question of the right role of women in society has emerged as a source of debate during an election season in the twenty-first century. But Nashville novelist Ann Patchett was clearly ready with a defense of the sexual revolution that took place more than fifty years ago and gave the women the single most powerful tool in achieving political and professional equality with men. In a new essay for The Wall Street Journal Patchett explains why politicians “can have my birth-control pills when you pry them out of my cold, dead hands”: