May 1, 2014 Earlier this week, we told you about Anita Norman, winner of the Tennessee state Poetry Out Loud finals. Now we’re here to report that Norman, a junior at Arlington High School near Memphis, has been awarded first place in the national championship held this week in Washington, D.C.
April 30, 2014 As he ends his year as a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, Nashville novelist Adam Ross has just received another prestigious appointment: he’ll be in the 2014-2015 class of Berlin Prize Fellows.
April 2, 2014 Alan Lightman is the highly acclaimed author of plays, poems, novels, and essays—and he’s working on a memoir about his Memphis childhood—so it is not surprising that the recent run of calamitous weather would inspire him to write a literary meditation on the relationship between human beings and the natural world.
March 31, 2014 When Amy Greene saw the cover design for Long Man, her new novel, her first thought was “My publisher takes me seriously as a writer.” And it’s true: this novel, unlike Bloodroot Greene’s critically acclaimed and New York Times-bestselling first novel, is not illustrated with a delicate watercolor image of a beautiful woman in a romantic dress. It’s illustrated with bold lines, block colors, imposing type—a designer’s signifier of literary heft and consequence.
March 14, 2014 Changers, the first in a fantasy series of YA novels by East Tennessee husband-and-wife team T Cooper and Allison Glock-Cooper, is singled out by the literary paper of record for its unusual appeal to teens struggling with identity issues—as what teen is not?
February 20, 2014 Novelist Tova Mirvis grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family in Memphis. As expected, she became engaged at twenty-two to an Orthodox Jewish man she met on a blind date. As expected, she followed the laws and expectations of her community, even as she wondered, “Is this all true?”
