Editor's Note
Humanities Tennessee has launched its spring fundraising campaign “to build a more curious, connected, and civil Tennessee for ourselves and future generations.” The goal is to raise $25,000 by June 18 to support the Southern Festival of Books, the Shared Futures Lab, and other vital programs, including Chapter 16. To donate and find out more about the campaign, see the donation page at the HT website.
Today at Chapter 16, Kashif Andrew Graham reviews On Witness and Respair, a new essay collection by two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. Describing the collection, Kashif writes that “Ward moves between poetry, memoir, and analysis with a literary litheness that invites us to forget genre for the time that we spend with her.”
In her review of Leslie Baird’s debut novel, Salomé, Sarah Norris observes that the book “offers a genre-defying tale: a bildungsroman wrapped in layers of gothic mysticism, with a reimagined classic femme fatale.”
Johnson City novelist Michael Amos Cody returns to the fictional town of Runion, North Carolina, in his latest offering, Avalon Moon, which reviewer Maggie Gigandet says “blends murder and the supernatural” in the story of a community “besieged by an unknown evil.”
News Roundup
- Jesse Graves was interviewed for Salvation South, which also featured a selection of his poems.
- “A Certain Point” by Edgar Kunz appeared on Poem-a-Day.
- Applications to this year’s Tremont Writers Conference are open until May 15, and scholarships are available.
- The Bill Peach Franklin Book Festival is set for Saturday, June 13 at the Williamson County Public Library in Franklin.
- Publishers Weekly reports that nonfiction book bans are on the rise, according to PEN America
