Editor's Note
Chapter 16’s founding editor, Margaret Renkl, is well known for her essays and New York Times columns about the natural world, with a particular focus on the under-appreciated wonders to be found in her own back yard. She has collaborated with her brother, artist Billy Renkl, on several books, and they’ve teamed up again to create their first book for children. Today at the site, they answer questions from Margaret Kingsbury about The Weedy Garden: A Happy Habitat for Wild Friends.
In her review of Kin, the eagerly anticipated new novel by Tayari Jones, Peggy Burch writes that Jones “has a gift for placing a reader in a specific time and place with her glorious grasp on details.” Kin’s story of two orphaned girls from Louisiana who grow up to pursue very different lives in Atlanta and Memphis is a “dynamic, emotional, beautifully constructed tale.”
Poet Beth Ann Fennelly turned her talents to a new form, micro-memoir, in her 2018 book Heating & Cooling. Fennelly’s new book, The Irish Goodbye, further explores this creative brevity. “Many pieces in The Irish Goodbye focus on grief,” reviewer Sara Beth West writes. Nevertheless, “Fennelly’s signature spitfire is present.”
News Roundup
- Evie Shockley’s foreword for a new edition of Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name was reprinted at Literary Hub.
- Jon Meacham has been named the Semiquincentennial Scholar for the National Constitution Center.
- Sonja Livingston wrote about a famine walk through Ireland for America.
- Anjali Enjeti was interviewed about her latest book, Ballot, for WAMC’s The Roundtable and an excerpt appeared at Literary Hub.
- Beth Ann Fennelly wrote about the loss of a grand tree in Garden & Gun.
