A writer’s grateful tribute to poet and teacher Bill Brown (1948-2023)
My freshman English teacher was a shaggy-haired hobbit-poet in horn-rimmed glasses. Most of Bill Brown’s students towered over him, but his sheer exuberance left us gazing up at him in wonder.
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The healing chugs on, even as grief sometimes circles back
I thought, how ironic, these gashes in my lower cheek and chin, hot and throbbing, my face a surprised welt I knew would scar, the left no longer my good side, a fitting present as I enter my “invisible” elder years more fully.
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Stacy Willingham delivers a complex mystery driven by female friendship
In her new thriller, Only if You’re Lucky, Stacy Willingham slowly unravels a knotted, twisted tale of loss, revenge, and manipulation. Willingham will discuss the book at Novel in Memphis on January 20 and Parnassus Books in Nashville on January 24.
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Characters can’t escape the past in Jill McCorkle’s Old Crimes
Jill McCorkle’s new story collection resonates with sympathy for characters struggling to make peace with themselves and those they love. McCorkle will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on January 23.
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In Eric Schlich’s new novel, a preacher’s son comes clean about his near-death experience
In Eric Schlich’s new novel, Eli Harpo’s Adventure to the Afterlife, the son of a Bible-belt minister begins to doubt his own story about visiting heaven. Schlich will discuss Eli Harpo’s Adventure to the Afterlife at Novel in Memphis on January 16.
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Khaled Mattawa’s lyrical cartography of human migration remembers, inspires
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: In his fifth collection, Fugitive Atlas, poet Khaled Mattawa — a graduate of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga — issues a timely invitation to examine our many migrations, gently calling us out of ourselves and into the world. In a series of imaginative and provocative poems, he asks us to consider the borders that exist off the map and apply meaning to our real lives.
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