June 8, 2010 Born in 1942 to a wise-cracking car salesman and a woman who appreciated politically incorrect humor, Fred Dalton Thompson grew up in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, where his Grandma Thompson padded around town showing off her excised goiter (which she carried around in a hankerchief), where he heard old men swap lies at the Blue Ribbon Café, and where he wandered into his share of boyhood scrapes. Thompson went on to spend eight years (1994-2003) in the U.S. Senate, conduct a failed presidential bid, and star in a long list of movies and television shows, but his new memoir, Teaching the Pig to Dance, sticks to his Lawrenceburg youth. Thompson spoke with Chapter 16 prior to his Nashville appearance at Davis-Kidd Booksellers on June 8 at 7 p.m.

May 4, 2010 A journalist who’s been writing about the South and its characters for more than three decades, Rheta Grimsley Johnson turns the probe on her herself in her second memoir, Enchanted Evening Barbie and the Second Coming. With both humor and poignancy, she writes about growing up among Southern Baptists, her college years at Auburn University, and a never-dull journalistic career that took her from a failed weekly startup with her then-husband Jimmy Johnson (who went on to create the Arlo & Janis comic strip) to big metro dailies such as the Memphis Commercial Appeal and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She will sign copies of her book at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on May 4 at 6 p.m.