Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Maria Browning

Metaphysician of Daily Life

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Wright will speak at ETSU

In advance of his return to Tennessee, Chapter 16 surveys the life and work of Charles Wright, whose poems are both accessible and deeply philosophical. Wright, a native of Pickwick Dam, will do two public events at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City on October 25.

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Building a Dog

Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut tell the full story of the famous Siberian fox study

In 1952, a Soviet geneticist named Dmitri Belyaev set out to create tame foxes, with dramatic success. In How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog), Belyaev’s colleague Lyudmila Trut and biologist Lee Alan Dugatkin give a detailed history of the now-famous Siberian fox study and explore its importance in solving a number of scientific mysteries. Dugatkin will appear at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville October 13-15.

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Dreams of Happiness

Two generations struggle for love and success in Stephanie Powell Watts’s No One Is Coming to Save Us

In No One Is Coming to Save Us, Stephanie Powell Watts takes up themes from The Great Gatsby—wealth, social position, the search for love—and explores them through a twenty-first-century African-American family in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. Watts will appear at the 2017 Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 13-15.

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Before and After

Roxane Gay confronts the truth of her obesity in Hunger

In Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Roxane Gay tells the story of how and why she became morbidly obese and explores what it’s like to live in a body the world feels entitled to judge. Gay will discuss Hunger at the Blair School of Music in Nashville on July 13, at 6:15 p.m.

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Consciousness and Chaos

Madison Smartt Bell takes the reader on a visionary journey in Behind the Moon

In Behind the Moon, Madison Smartt Bell takes readers on a complex, hallucinatory tour of human and animal consciousness in the course of a story about a mother’s search for her lost daughter.

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A Satisfying Journey

Richard Tillinghast seeks communion with diverse places in Journeys into the Mind of the World

In a new collection of essays, Journeys into the Mind of the World: A Book of Places, poet and inveterate traveler Richard Tillinghast revisits some of the locales that have spoken most profoundly to him, recalling his own experiences and exploring the history and culture that make each one unique.

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