Chapter 16 - Part 190

“When the Dust Settles”

By Bill Brown | July 11, 2019

Bill Brown grew up in West Tennessee ten miles from the Mississippi River. He is the author of eight poetry collections and a writing textbook. Formerly the director of the writing program at Hume-Fogg Academic High School in Nashville, he was named a Distinguished Teacher in the Arts in 1995 by the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts and the 2011 Writer of the Year by the Tennessee Writers Alliance. His latest book is The News Inside. “When the Dust Settles” is from his 2008 collection, Late Winter.

Teaching and Unteaching—and Entertaining All the Way

For more than three decades, Patricia McKissack has been writing children’s books that bring to life the stories, and the truth, of her ancestors

By Susannah Felts | July 10, 2019

As she was coming of age in Nashville in the 1950s, there were many places award-winning children’s author Patricia McKissack was not allowed to go. She remembers hotels and restaurants that forbade African Americans entry, and movie theaters with a separate doorway in the alley for black patrons. The farthest reaches of the Grand Ole Opry’s balcony, known as the buzzard’s roost, was the only seating open to African Americans, McKissack recalls. She never partook: “My grandfather said that watermelons would bloom in January if any of his children went down there. ‘We don’t sit in no buzzard’s roost,’ he said. ‘We’re human beings, not buzzards.'”

Rugged Country

Min Jin Lee discusses identity, diaspora, and resistance in her novel Pachinko

By Steve Haruch | July 9, 2019

Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, a finalist for the National Book Award, follows a Korean family through four generations of migration, hardship, and survival, telling their interlocking stories in vivid detail.

“Born Under the Sign Of”

By Lisa Coffman | July 8, 2019

Lisa Coffman, who grew up in East Tennessee, has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and Bucknell University’s Stadler Center for Poetry. Her first collection of poetry, Likely, won the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize from Kent State University Press. Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, including Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VI: Tennessee. She teaches at the California State Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo. “Born Under the Sign Of” is an excerpt from her new collection, Less Obvious Gods.

Dark Lantern

An author finds his own teenage ghost in a thrift-shop book

By Michael Sims | July 5, 2019

What I saw was not a dusty old book but a boy in a wheelchair by a window in a ramshackle house farther east in Tennessee—two hours away, on the Cumberland Plateau near Crossville.

Meeting in the Middle

Julia Watts’s new novel for teens finds room for friendship in the so-called culture wars

By Julie Danielson | July 4, 2019

Quiver, Julia Watts’s new novel for teens, is a story of acceptance against all odds.

Camilla and the Caterpillars

By Frances Figart, illustrated by Matt Brass
Smokies Life
68 pages
$14.95

A young girl’s encounter with an extraordinary caterpillar in the Great Smoky Mountains leads her and her family on a quest to plant a national park right in their own backyard.

This environmentally themed chapter book for ages 6 through 11 introduces young readers to important ecological concepts including habitat loss and the interdependence of native species and offers a compelling grassroots solution through native-plant gardening that invites anyone to take part in addressing the growing biodiversity crisis.

~the publisher