Editor's Note
In partnership with the 2026 Southern Festival of Books, Nashville’s The Porch will be offering workshops with festival authors on Friday, October 16. Instructors include Susannah Felts, Asa Drake, Sun Yung Shin, Emily Nemens, Ramona Ausubel, and Kayla Rae Whitaker. The workshops will be held at the Tennessee State Museum. Full info and a link to register for the workshops can be found here.
AI is a hot topic in the literary world these days, to put it mildly, and Tom Wood recently examined the issue through two articles for the Nashville edition of The Ledger. You’ll find those pieces here and here. (Readers of Chapter 16 should know that our current policy is not to publish any material we know to be written or assisted by AI. We urge writers to approach AI tools with full awareness of how their use may negatively impact publishing opportunities and intellectual property rights.)
Today at the site, Jane Marcellus reviews The Wound Is Where the Light Enters, a memoir by Clarksville, Tennessee, native Chris Young. Jane describes this story of incarceration and resilience as “a testimonial to the human spirit and a hallelujah to libraries, which literally changed Young’s life.” Aram Goudsouzian interviews historian Donna Reeves about The Fight for Visibility: Black Memphis Confronts the Lost Cause, an account of the city’s long struggle to rid itself of the Civil War monuments Reeves calls “mascots of white supremacy.” Bianca Sass completes our trio of pieces with her review of The Foursome, the latest novel by Christina Baker Kline, who will be at this year’s Southern Festival of Books.
News Roundup
- Porchlight published a volume of early work by William Gay, with a foreword by David Joy.
- Poet Ian Hall was interviewed for Scenic Roots.
- “Seekers on This Journey,” a poem by Henry L. Jones, was published in NSIBIDI: The Markings and Movement of Ancient Africa by Kevin J. Hales, Ph.D., and Jones’ painting “The Seekers of Rivers” is the cover image of the book.
- Boss Brooks by Kathy Bingham Turner and Leon Alligood won the Silver Falchion Award for Nonfiction at this year’s Killer Nashville conference.
- Nafissa Thompson-Spires discussed her forthcoming novel, The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford, with Publishers Weekly.
