Editor’s Notes

Humanities Tennessee welcomes a new staff member this month. René Dillard, a former public schoolteacher with degrees from Vanderbilt and the University of Chicago, is HT’s director of development. You can find out a bit more about her here. (She’s a fan of reading, dogs, and fireflies — a stellar trio of interests, in our humble opinion.) Today at…

More than a century ago, Rebecca Rose Mooradian’s great-grandmother Dzovinar escaped the Armenian Genocide. Mooradian has turned that story of survival into her debut picture book, Rose by the Sea. Today at Chapter 16, Margaret Kingsbury interviews the author about what moved her to write the story and what she hopes children might learn from her great-grandmother’s experience. Noting that…

Novelist, short story writer, and poet Ron Rash is well known to Chapter 16 readers, and there are two upcoming opportunities for aspiring writers to benefit from his wisdom. He’ll be the keynote speaker at this year’s Spring Literary Festival at ETSU, where he’ll appear along with Nickole Brown, Rose McLarney, and Juan Martinez. This fall, Rash will serve as one of the faculty members for the 2026 Tremont…

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…

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.…

Reverend James Lawson Jr. was not the most visible figure in the Civil Rights Movement, but he was a major influence on its commitment to nonviolence and played a critical role in many key events, including the Nashville sit-ins and the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike. Before he died in 2024, Lawson collaborated with writer Emily Yellin on his…