Editor's Note
This year’s Tennessee Book Award winners have been announced! The award for fiction goes to the novel Run for the Hills by Sewanee writer Kevin Wilson. This Changes Everything: A Surprisingly Funny Story About Race, Cancer, Faith, and Other Things We Don’t Talk About by Nashville actor, musician, comedian, and activist Tyler Merritt receives the award for nonfiction. The award for poetry goes to Helen of Troy, 1993, a collection by Maria Zoccola, a Memphis native. Each author will be recognized at a community event in their home city. For more information, visit Humanities Tennessee. Congratulations to the winners!
On the site today, Kashif Andrew Graham reviews Triage, the latest genre-blending work by Claudia Rankine. “In a world that seeks to return us to hard binaries of class, race, and gender,” Kashif writes, “the categorical fluidity of Rankine’s work is a reprieve.”
In her review of Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive?, Peggy Burch writes, “In Macfarlane’s prose, rivers sing, dance, and nurture the lives in and around them as he contemplates their natural, legal, and political rights to live.”
Colin Asher’s The Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music “unspools myths,” writes reviewer David Wesley Williams. In profiles of legendary performers like Lead Belly, Johnny Cash, and Tupac Shakur, Asher also “gives us something larger — a dark-side portrait of an American prison system built more to punish than to rehabilitate.”
News Roundup:
- An essay by Emily Bernard was published in The American Scholar.
- Vanderbilt University’s reading series this fall will feature authors Peter Orner, ise Paschen, Ayana Mathis, and Victoria Redel.
- Jon Meacham explained the importance of Constitution Day on Morning Joe.
- ETSU’s fall lineup of literary events includes authors Marc Harshman, Erin Miller Reid, Tony Earley, Jesse Graves, Michael Cody, Larry Thacker, and Mark Baumgartner
