November 19, 2012 In the November issue of Smithsonian magazine, Roy Blount Jr., a Vanderbilt graduate who has written about everything from the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup to the streets of New Orleans, details the challenge of bringing Abraham Lincoln’s presidency to the big screen in Stephen Spielberg’s new film, Lincoln.
November 16, 2012 Novelist, essayist, physicist, MIT professor, and Memphis native Alan Lightman will make an appearance at the First Unitarian Church of Memphis on November 16th. His lecture topic, “The Physicist as Humanist: Science, Art, and Religion,” speaks to the complex interplay between science and metaphysics that are at the heart of Lightman’s most recent book, Mr g: A Novel about the Creation.
November 9, 2012 Sewanee graduate and author of the acclaimed essay collection Pulphead John Jeremiah Sullivan has written a new essay about his reluctant adventures in massage and other spa treatments, which ranged from a biodynamic facial/massage to the application of Tibetan singing bowls. On assignment from The New York Times Magazine, where he is a contributing writer, Sullivan addresses his discomfort with being touched by strangers, only to be surprised by his response to the bodywork.
November 9, 2012 Crossville, Tennessee, native and author of such books as Adam’s Navel and Apollo’s Fire Michael Sims celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of E.B. White’s children’s classic Charlotte’s Web by sitting down with NPR to discuss White’s devotion to his beloved characters.
November 2, 2012 Four Way Books has released a new collection of poems from Blas Falconer, Coordinator for the Creative Writing Program at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville. The Foundling Wheel is the second collection from Falconer, who has received an NEA Fellowship, the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award, and a Tennessee Individual Artist Grant.
October 30, 2012
Pulitzer Prize winner David Maraniss has been named Writer in Residence at the Martha Rivers Ingram Commons and the College of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt University. Maraniss will co-teach two courses, Presidential Biographies and Reading and Writing about Sports in American Life. In a Vanderbilt press release, Maraniss says, “I’ll be focusing on subjects that obsess me—the art of biography, presidential politics and the sociology of sports.”
