April 4, 2012 Organizers of Killer Nashville, the annual conference for readers and aspiring writers, has launched a new blog, “A Killer Conversation: an online community of readers and writers of mysteries, thrillers, suspense, and true crime.” In addition to the daily posts by Killer Nashville staff, the blog will each Wednesday feature a new post by a bestselling author or forensics expert. The series kicks off with Nashville’s own Jennie Bentley, a New York Times bestselling novelist who writes candidly about her own writer-for-hire experience:

March 26, 2012 Political commentators keep expressing astonishment that the question of the right role of women in society has emerged as a source of debate during an election season in the twenty-first century. But Nashville novelist Ann Patchett was clearly ready with a defense of the sexual revolution that took place more than fifty years ago and gave the women the single most powerful tool in achieving political and professional equality with men. In a new essay for The Wall Street Journal Patchett explains why politicians “can have my birth-control pills when you pry them out of my cold, dead hands”:

March 16, 2012 Here at Chapter 16, we like to post news of Tennessee authors—and authors who once lived in Tennessee—as the news occurs, one news item at a time, but that strategy has proved impossible with Ann Patchett, whose annus mirabilis bestows new mirabiles faster than we can keep up. Here’s the latest news for the Patron Saint of Independent Bookstores: