Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Awards All Around

Last weekend, literary Nashville was in the national spotlight

Last weekend Jeff Zentner and Congressman John Lewis picked up prestigious prizes from the American Library Association, and the team that produces Nashville Public Television’s A Word on Words won an Emmy. 

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“Driving I-24 Through Kentucky at Night, I Think How Easy It Would Be”

Book excerpt: Visibility at Zero

Visibility at Zero is Austin Kodra’s first full-length poetry collection. He received his M.F.A. from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, where he served as an editorial assistant for Crab Orchard Review. His poetry and fiction have been published in The Adroit Journal, Superstition Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, and elsewhere. Kodra lives in Knoxville. He will discuss Visibility at Zero at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville on January 30 at 7 p.m.

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A Park is Born

Following the success of last year’s Smoky Jack, Ken Wise and Anne Bridges revive another memoir by Paul J. Adams

In 1925 a young man from Knoxville named Paul Adams established the first permanent camp atop Mt. Le Conte, the highest peak in what would become Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Editors Ken Wise and Anne Bridges have now updated Adams’s memoir, Mount Le Conte, first published fifty years ago, as a follow-up to Smoky Jack, which was published posthumously last year.

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Finding Holmes

Michael Sims investigates the very real origins of the greatest fictional detective

With The Story of Charlotte’s Web and The Adventures of Henry Thoreau, Michael Sims invented what amounts to a new genre: the biography of a particular book. In Arthur and Sherlock: Conan Doyle and the Creation of Holmes, he follows literary and historical clues to identify the origins of the most famous fictional detective in the world.

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Fearless and Exacting

The new Sewanee Review will appear the end of this month, and “new” hardly begins to describe it

Novelist Adam Ross, the first new editor of The Sewanee Review since 1973, will launch the storied literary magazine’s redesign on January 31. In it, there’s enough transgression to satisfy the spirit of Tennessee Williams, whose bequest supports the Review’s publication.

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They Looked Away

In The Second Mrs. Hockaday, Susan Rivers has created an original Civil War tale

Loosely based on a real incident, The Second Mrs. Hockaday by Susan Rivers is the tale of a pampered seventeen-year-old daughter of a South Carolina plantation owner who marries a widowed Confederate major. Rivers will appear at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on January 25 at 6:30 p.m.

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