May 21, 2012 Abraham Verghese is a Renaissance man for our multicultural age: an American citizen born in Ethiopia to Indian parents from the Kerala region, he is a physician who trained in New York and Tennessee (and practiced in Texas and California), an author who studied at the legendary Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a Syrian Christian whose Hindu ancestors were converted to the faith by the evangelizing of St. Thomas himself. In most ways, this fluid sense of identity has served Verghese well, informing a vast array of essays, memoirs, and journal articles, as well as one sweeping novel, Cutting for Stone, that spans several continents and has a page-turning plot most often compared to the work of John Irving.

May 18, 2012 Knoxville is a city that treasures its writers: both local newspapers—the Knoxville News Sentinel and Metro Pulse—routinely cover books and author events; its independent bookstore, Union Ave. Books, hosts frequent readings and book-club meetings; the public library sponsors a world-class Children’s Festival of Reading each year; and the University of Tennessee, which boasts a “Writers in the Library” program and a creative-writing department, has a Ph.D. program in writing that’s ranked fifth in the entire nation for funding. In other words, novelist Christopher Hebert landed in a good town.

May 17, 2012 Unfortunately—or fortunately, depending on whether you’re referring to literary artistry or raw book sales—Between Shades of Gray by Nashville novelist Ruta Sepetys is frequently being confused with a novel by a similar name: Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James. Both authors are on book tour this spring. Sepety’s book is a YA novel about a young girl’s incarceration in Stalin’s death camps. James’s is about… something else.

May 14, 2012 In 2005, when Richard Bausch accepted a job in the creative-writing program at the University of Memphis, it was on one condition: the department must agree that part of his responsibilities would include the opportunity to teach, free of charge, a group of aspiring writers in the Memphis community.

May 4, 2012 Tennessee’s legislative agenda this year has earned the state unwelcome notice in a national media that too often seems downright eager for any chance to portray Southerners as stupid, lazy, and mean. Late-night comedians like Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart have had particular fun this legislative season with new Tennessee laws governing what may or may not be taught—or even said—by the state’s schoolteachers. So it was an especially welcome surprise to open last Sunday’s edition of The New York Time and find a smart, reasoned, historically nuanced response to the current political climate by an actual Tennessean: novelist Amy Greene, author of Bloodroot.