Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

God’s Gonna Trouble the Water

In Midnight Without a Moon, Linda Williams Jackson considers the civil-rights movement through the eyes of a feisty teenage girl

Thirteen-year-old Rose Lee Carter knows that the Jim Crow South has to change, but she’s not sure she wants to be the one to do it. Linda Williams Jackson makes a stunning debut with her middle-grade historical novel, Midnight Without a Moon.

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Fear, Fury, Hope, Love

For two teenagers, a same-sex love affair plays out against a backdrop of family grief

In How to Make a Wish, Nashville YA author Ashley Herring Blake deftly describes the highs and lows of a burgeoning love affair between two young women dealing with personal problems that would challenge adults of any age. Blake will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 2 at 6:30 p.m.

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The March of Science

In The Songs of Trees, David George Haskell writes with a poet’s ear and a biologist’s precision

In his 2012 book, The Forest Unseen, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, David George Haskell revealed the web of life hidden within a small circle of old-growth Tennessee forest. His second book, The Songs of Trees, expands that web to the globe itself. Haskell will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 30 at 2 p.m.

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We Love Imperfectly

In Anything is Possible, Elizabeth Strout explores the intricacies of human frailty

The subtle elegance and beauty of Anything is Possible, Elizabeth Strout’s new collection of linked stories, will further cement the author as one of her era’s most gifted and compassionate chroniclers of human frailty. Strout will discuss Anything is Possible at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 27 at 6:30 p.m. Tickets are required to join the signing line and are available with purchase of the book from Parnassus.

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What is Left

A dime-store scrapbook preserves priceless seventy-year-old memories

“Stayed here on our wedding night,” is the first entry in the scrapbook. Accompanying her text is a linen-paper postcard of the Hayes Hotel in Jackson, Michigan. My parents spent an entire month driving to California and back, a lengthy journey even today, and a grand expedition in the 1940s, before the wide availability of air conditioning and the franchising of America.

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In the Tense Space Between Two Worlds

Adrienne Berard’s Water Tossing Boulders looks at the American civil-rights movement through a new lens

Adrienne Berard will discuss Water Tossing Boulders: How a Family of Chinese Immigrants Led the First Fight to Desegregate Schools in the Jim Crow South at Bookstock, a celebration held at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library in Memphis on April 29. Bookstock is held annually and this year will feature appearances by forty area authors, food trucks, live music, and a host of children’s activities, including face painting, arts and crafts, and story time. All events are free and open to the public.

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