Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Maria Browning

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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A Vast Cacophony of Contradictions

Photographer Jack Spencer seeks the soul of a country

Nashville-based photographer Jack Spencer describes America as “a vast cacophony of contradictions,” but his stunning collection, This Land: An American Portrait, transcends the dissonance. Spencer will sign and discuss This Land at the David Lusk Gallery in Nashville on March 18 from 4 to 7 p.m.

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