One sound undulated constantly through my father’s life
His tone was edgy. He limped past me gruffly. My mother flashed me the look which meant to shut up about it. Other than to occasionally refer to himself as crippled, my father almost never talked about the complications of his disability.
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A holiday experiment yields a lesson in kindness
In return for sore feet, knuckles slammed in register drawers, and more of that sort of amusement, I had the privilege of watching, over and over again, one of the most powerful human emotions: generosity, and the genuine desire to give to others, not as a perfunctory requirement, but as an expression of love.
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Fight like hell and then forgive, but don’t forget
Everyone in my family played something. Dad loved word games, dice games, and pool. Mom was a fierce competitor at Monopoly, rummy, and double solitaire, during which, in her motherly way, she would trash talk her offspring to gain psychological advantage.
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A debut poetry collection grapples with the vulnerability of children in a violent world
In her debut collection, Hive, Nashville poet Christina Stoddard writes in the voice of a teenage Mormon girl about violence and its lifelong effects. Stoddard will read from her work at Scarritt Bennett Center in Nashville on December 16.
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Book Excerpt: The Girl Singer
Marianne Worthington is a poet, editor, and cofounder of Still: The Journal. Her work has appeared in Oxford American, CALYX, Grist, and other outlets. She is coeditor, with Silas House, of Piano in a Sycamore: Writing Lessons from the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop. She grew up in Knoxville and currently lives in southeastern Kentucky.
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Book Excerpt: Sinew: 10 Years of Poetry in the Brew
Henry L. Jones is a Black poet, artist, playwright, performance artist, and activist. His poetry has appeared in The Willow Review, The Vanderbilt Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. His second poetry collection, Black Skillet Blues: Poetry without Cornbread (Beatlick Press) is due in late 2021. A Fisk University graduate and the inaugural poet laureate of Hendersonville, Jones is an editor of Sinew: 10 Years of Poetry in the Brew, an anthology of work from the long-running open-mic reading series based in Nashville.
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