Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

“The Angel Makers and I Try to Bake a Cake”

Book Excerpt: Skin Splitting

Bryanna Licciardi is a graduate of Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, earned an M.F.A. in poetry from Emerson College, and is pursuing a Ph.D. in literacy studies from Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro. Skin Splitting is her first book.

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Saved by a Song

Mary Gauthier talks with Chapter 16 about becoming your own witness

While touring to support Rifles and Rosary Beads, her new album co-written with American veterans, Nashville songwriter Mary Gauthier signed a book deal with St. Martin’s Press to tell her own story of trauma and recovery.

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Through a Great Wilderness

A songwriter navigates the Nashville music scene in Gabriel’s Songbook by Michael Amos Cody

It’s an old tale—boy meets girl; boy trades girl for a shot at fame; boy comes to regret that last part. Gabriel’s Songbook by Michael Amos Cody is a love song to music—but not to the music business.

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Current State

The stories in Matthew Baker’s Hybrid Creatures are perfectly tuned to the twenty-first century

Matthew Baker’s new story collection, Hybrid Creatures, tracks the quests of four brilliant, lonely misfits. Together they add up to something like a collage of one anguished archetype.

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Lucky Thirteen

Jerry Joyner’s inventive 1975 collaboration with Remy Charlip hits shelves in a new edition

Thirteen, Jerry Joyner’s 1975 collaboration with artist Remy Charlip, returns to shelves this month in a new edition for a new generation of young readers. Joyner will visit Parnassus Books on May 23 to discuss the book, as well as his remarkable career.

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Written in a Fever

Songwriter Billy Edd Wheeler’s Hotter Than a Pepper Sprout, is a beguiling tale of an astonishing life

In Hotter Than a Pepper Sprout, songwriter Billy Edd Wheeler chronicles his life from Depression-era Appalachia to Yale, New York, and Nashville. Told with charm and detail, his story celebrates creativity and a well-lived life

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