News & Notes

January 29, 2011 If you buy your books from Amazon.com, you pay no sales tax; if you buy your books from your friendly neighborhood bookseller– or from the nearest mega-Walmart– you do. That’s because Amazon is a web-only retailer without a physical presence in the state. But if the Internet behemoth opens two massive distributions centers in East Tennessee as planned, it will have one. Nevertheless, Tennessee lawmakers have no plans to require Amazon, which will bring up to 2,000 much-needed jobs to the state, to charge sales tax on books ordered by Tennesseans.

January 29, 2011 For poets, the closest thing to winning the lottery has to be for Garrison Keillor to read their poems on his public radio program, The Writer’s Almanac. Today, Darnell Arnoult, Chapter 16 board member and Writer in Residence at Lincoln Memorial University, won the lottery for the third time when Keillor read her poem, “Psychology Today.” The poem begins,

     Have you ever had
            delusions of grandeur?

January 24, 2011 In the February/March issue of BookForum, author and Chapter 16 contributor Clay Risen reviews a new book by video-game designer Jane McGonigal. Reality Is Broken examines the goals and effectiveness of a unique New York City charter school called Quest to Learn, where students tackle assignments designed to mimic the experience of playing a video game.

January 23, 2011 Kate Daniels’s poem “Disjunction” appears in this week’s edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education. “Disjunction,” which was included in the 1998 collection, Four Testimonies, begins,

     On my knees in my office,
     leaning over the metal can
     of waste, I squeeze my breasts
     to express the milk that’s accrued
     in my graduate seminar on postmodern

January 20, 2011 The Morning News has entered Amy Greene’s debut novel Bloodroot in its Seventh Annual Tournament of Books. The competition, which pits sixteen of the most critically acclaimed novels of the previous year against each other in a seeded bracket, doesn’t kick off until March 7. The news today “will allow time for Tournament fans to begin reading so they can follow along with the blood sport,” notes the press release.

January 17, 2011 Chattanooga native Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a biography of Andrew Jackson, knows his way around a gun cabinet, according to an editorial Meacham delivered last Friday night on the PBS program Need to Know, which he co-hosts: “My father gave me a .22 rifle when I was 9 and a single barrel .410 shotgun when I was 10. I have inherited many of my family’s guns, including a rifle made by my great, great, great grandfather, which I will preserve and give to my son.