As evidenced by the travels depicted her most recent memoir, Year of the Monkey, Patti Smith has embodied the nomadic spirit of the public troubadour for decades. Whether she’s performing riotous sets with her band or working side by side with literary lights, Smith has forged a role in our arts culture unlike any other.
Drawn from her own family history, Louise Erdrich’s stirring new novel, The Night Watchman, unfolds around dedicated Chippewa tribal councilman Thomas Wazhushk, who enlists the help of many in his community to fight encroaching legal threat to their tribe’s survival.
Lorraine M. López’s sharply funny collection of linked short stories, Postcards from the Gerund State, focuses on a group of women faculty navigating life and work at a small conservative women’s college.
Journalist and essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates brings compassion and mastery to his debut novel, The Water Dancer, a story of slavery, freedom, and the mystical power of memory. Coates will discuss The Water Dancer at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center in Nashville on November 6 at 6:15 p.m.
In her debut novel, The Affairs of the Falcóns, Melissa Rivero creates an indelible protagonist in undocumented, Peruvian-born Ana, whose life as a mother and wife in mid-1990s New York is a constant, tenuous gauntlet. Melissa Rivero will discuss The Affairs of the Falcóns at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, held on October 11-13.
Maurice Carlos Ruffin casts a satirical spell in his debut novel, We Cast A Shadow. Its unnamed narrator, driven by fierce love for his son, makes decisions that expose his family to the dangers of a world that may seem dystopian but in fact lies excruciatingly close to our own. Ruffin will appear at the 2019 Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville on October 11-13.
