Susannah Felts

April 22, 2011 To be a fiction writer from Mississippi is to inherit a literary legacy as heavy as Gulf Coast air in August, one rippling with stories of lives both remarkable and remarkably debauched. Enter the novelist and short-story writer Brad Watson, whose fiction does not traffic in what his friend Barry Hannah dismissed as “a canned dream of the South.” Still, it is laced with just enough distinctly Southern settings and characters for a reader to feel she’s getting the real deal—a Mississippi writer who is carrying on the literary legacy of his home state. Watson will be the visiting writer at Nashville’s Montgomery Bell Academy April 25-26. On April 25, he will give a public reading in the Pfeffer Lecture Hall at 5:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

February 22, 2011 Like Bobbie Ann Mason before her, Holly Goddard Jones entered the literary scene with a much-praised debut collection of stories set in her home state. Jones is no Mason redux, but in Girl Trouble she does look carefully at the Kentucky in which she was raised, tapping into veins similar to those explored by Mason. Set in the fictional small town of Roma, these stories portray with deep sensitivity the emotional injuries of men and women whose lives are etched there. On February 24 at 7 p.m., Holly Goddard Jones will read from her work in Buttrick Hall, Room 102, on the Vanderbilt University campus.

February 14, 2011 The characters in Kevin Wilson’s debut story collection, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, experience emotions that almost any reader would find both soothingly and troublingly familiar, though the stories in which they appear often depict realities far from any we know. With his first novel slated for publication this summer, Wilson, who directs the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, answered questions via email about his work—and the state of things for young literary writers today—for Chapter 16. Wilson will read from his work at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville on February 14 at 7 p.m.

February 2, 2011 Wilberforce University, near Xenia, Ohio, is one of the nation’s oldest historically black universities, the first to be owned and operated by African Americans. Behind its founding in 1863 is a fascinating yet all-but-forgotten piece of history: the school stands on what was once the site of Tawawa Resort, a place where Southern slaveholders vacationed, often in the company of their enslaved mistresses. It’s this setting that Dolen Perkins-Valdez imagines as the backdrop for her engrossing debut novel, Wench, which Publishers’ Weekly called “heart-wrenching, intriguing, original and suspenseful.”

January 24, 2011 Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, the setting of Jesmyn Ward’s debut novel, Where the Line Bleeds, is a tiny town nestled in the swampy, piney depths of the Gulf Coast, where few leave and solid jobs are fewer still. It is a world that Ward, currently writer-in-residence at Ole Miss, knows intimately. Her deep empathy for the people of this place, and her attentiveness to its landscape, make the book a stirring, evocative portrait of two brave young African-American men who ask for little beyond the love and support of their maternal grandmother, Ma-mee. Ward will read at the Hodges Library on the University of Tennessee’s Knoxville campus on January 25 at 7 p.m.