Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Emily Choate

Forgotten Wars

Ron Rash’s latest, The Caretaker, is a haunted fable of love and loss

At the center of Ron Rash’s latest novel, The Caretaker, is Blackburn Gant, who does his best to look after both the dead and the living. Ron Rash will appear via Zoom with George Singleton at The Emporium in Knoxville on October 5.

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The Vernacular of Beyond

Author and naturalist Janisse Ray advocates for wildness

In books like Wild Spectacle and Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Georgia author, naturalist, author, and farmer Janisse Ray communicates profound reverence for the profuse complexity within our world’s ecosystems. Ray will be the keynote speaker at the MTSU Write Conference in Murfreesboro on October 7.

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As Much Belowground as Above

A writer returns to the Smoky Mountains and The Overstory

The Overstory,” writes Emily Choate, “is like the Smokies — a lush host to manifold inhabitants, some knowable to the casual visitor and others elusive, inscrutable.” Choate will lead a virtual discussion of Richard Powers’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel on July 18.

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A Part, a Whole, a Root, a Bloom

Katy Simpson Smith’s The Weeds links the stories of two women botanists

Katy Simpson Smith’s The Weeds links the stories of two unnamed women, working in different centuries, who both find themselves apprenticed to male botanists cataloguing every species of plant growing among the stones of the Roman Colosseum.

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When They Decide It’s Spring

Poet Anna Laura Reeve entwines motherhood with the natural world in her luminous debut collection

In her debut collection, Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility, poet Anna Laura Reeve depicts motherhood with startling honesty and insight, enmeshed with experiences of the natural world and the enduring drive to make art. Reeve will discuss the book at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on April 16.

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Where We Labor

What Things Cost offers a moving tribute to our nation’s working poor

What Things Cost: an anthology for the people is a landmark collection of labor writing. Editors Rebecca Gayle Howell and Ashley M. Jones center the unsung voices of laborers whose work has been devalued or ignored.

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