Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Overtime

On Saturdays, we play with their children and pour the tea

I arrange the clementines on the table next to the store-bought croissants and juice boxes; this has now become a ritual, though not a meditative one.

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Affrilachia from A to Z

Frank X Walker’s new picture book pays tribute to Black life in Appalachia

Frank X Walker’s A Is for Affrilachia, illustrated by upfromsumdirt, is a picture book for all ages.

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A Breath of Fresh Air

John Seigenthaler promoted thoughtful discourse one book at a time

A Word on Words: The Best of John Seigenthaler’s Interviews celebrates the significant contribution to the American literary landscape made by Nashville’s John Seigenthaler, a legendary journalist and First Amendment advocate.

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Wounded Eagle

Matthew Desmond’s new book dispels myths about poverty in America

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, By America offers a persuasive case that we should all become “poverty abolitionists” who refuse to live as “unwitting enemies of the poor.” Desmond will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on March 20.

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“Daffodils”

Book Excerpt: What Bends Us Blue

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Former Knoxvillian Tom Lombardo is a poet, essayist, and freelance medical writer who lives in Midtown Atlanta. His poems have appeared in Southern Poetry Review, Ambit, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, and New York Quarterly, among others. He is the editor of an anthology, After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life Shattering Events, and is the poetry series editor for Press 53. His M.F.A. is from Queens University of Charlotte. 

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Where We Labor

What Things Cost offers a moving tribute to our nation’s working poor

What Things Cost: an anthology for the people is a landmark collection of labor writing. Editors Rebecca Gayle Howell and Ashley M. Jones center the unsung voices of laborers whose work has been devalued or ignored.

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