Sisters Under the Skin
July 26, 2013 The eighteen contributors to An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on Their Poor and Working-Class Roots are a multicultural group: black, white, Native American, Asian, Latina, lesbian, straight—and that’s not even a complete list of their declared identities. But for all the writers’ apparent diversity, the personal essays in this collection reveal them to be sisters under the skin. Americans don’t like to acknowledge the profound, lingering influence of class, but the stories that Vanderbilt professor Lorraine López has collected in An Angle of Vision describe a set of experiences shaped by poverty that is shared across all boundaries of color and community. Feelings and memories echo so insistently throughout the book that the writers seem almost to be speaking with a single voice. Lopez will appear at the twenty-fifth annual Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 11-13. All festival events are free and open to the public.
July 24, 2013 Andrew Hudgins is a distinguished poet and scholar, and he’s also a lifelong, inveterate teller of jokes. In his memoir, The Joker, he tells the story of his life through the jokes that marked its passages. Today he talks with Chapter 16 about what makes a great joke and why we need to look at the ugly side of humor. Hudgins will appear on July 27, 2013, at 4:15 p.m. at the Bairnwick Women’s Center on the campus of The University of the South in Sewanee. The event, part of the 
June 25, 2013 In 1936, James Agee wrote an article for Fortune that was never published in the magazine but eventually became his landmark book with photographer Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Presumed lost until it was uncovered in Agee’s papers in 2003, the original article—with a new selection of Evans’s photos—has just been released as Cotton Tenants: Three Families, a graceful and impassioned piece of journalism that powerfully conveys the human cost of a cruel economic system.
