Editor's Note
The 2026 season of the TN Writers | TN Stories series will kick off at the Tennessee State Museum on March 7 with Mary Ellen Pethel and Don Cusic discussing their book Howdy! The Minnie Pearl Story, winner of the 2025 Tennessee History Book Award. (Look for a review of the book at Chapter 16 next week.) The series will run through the fall, with scheduled authors to include Sheri Sellmeyer, author of Nashville’s New Americans, and Joe Pagetta, author of The Apostle of Tennessee.
Today at Chapter 16, Amy Lyons reviews Dear Second Husband, a collection of linked short stories by Nashville writer Susan Finch. The collection “takes readers on a layered journey through the lives of Nashvillians facing a range of emotional entanglements and predicaments,” centering characters “who often grasp for more and come up short.”
In her essay “Uncle Billy and the Art of Drinking,” Peggy Culp remembers the toll addiction took on her gentle uncle, as well as the family and friends who cared for him.
In this final week of Black History Month, we revisit Erica Ciccarone’s 2022 interview with poet Alora Young about Walking Gentry Home: A Memoir of My Foremothers in Verse. Young’s poems pay tribute to five generations of Black women in a family deeply rooted in the West Tennessee town of Halls.
News Roundup
- A poem by Lisa Dordal was published in Image.
- A story by Brooks Egerton was published in Discretionary Love.
- Dolen Perkins-Valdez and Silas House are among the winners of this year’s Southern Book Prize.
- Adam Ross is the winner of the Christopher Isherwood Prize and Ace Atkins is a finalist in the mystery/thriller category in the Los Angeles Time Book Prizes.
- Susan Gregg Gilmore is the winner of the Willie Morris Award for fiction.
