Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Liz Garrigan

Calling All Writers

A spring bounty of writers’ workshops and festivals is being offered across Tennessee

March 1, 2016 As Leo Tolstoy wrote in his masterpiece Anna Karenina, “Spring is the time of plans and projects.” That’s certainly true for literary culture across Tennessee, where abundant book festivals and writers’ workshops will welcome poets, authors, aspiring writers, and students. Here’s a guide to upcoming events across the state.

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Living for Today—or Trying To

A Chapter 16 writer reflects on her life in Paris since last week’s terrorist attacks

November 20, 2015 We moved to Paris just shy of five years ago because, above all, we wanted our sons to become global citizens, to learn another language, to go to school with children from countries the world over, to see more of the world than a more conventional life in the United States would allow. But the very centrality and symbolism of Paris is what’s now making us all feel more vulnerable than we ever have.

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Flaming Malevolence

In Erica Wright’s second thriller, beloved New York drag queens are the target of a hate group

November 19, 2015 In Erica Wright’s second thriller, The Granite Moth, private eye Kathleen Stone is still trying to nab drug kingpin Salvatore Magrelli. But her caseload multiplies when two drag queens, colleagues of her dear friend Dolly at the Pink Panther nightclub, are killed in an ostensible accident during the city’s Halloween parade on Sixth Avenue. Wright will discuss The Granite Moth at Parnassus Books in Nashville on November 24, 2015, at 6:30 p.m.

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Decoding a Civil-War Mystery

In Linda Lee Peterson’s latest novel, a San Francisco editor returns to her Southern roots to unravel ancient family intrigue and forbidden love

October 22, 2015 In Linda Lee Peterson’s third novel, The Spy on the Tennessee Walker, San Francisco magazine editor Maggie Fiori learns that her great-great-great grandmother was a nurse who treated soldiers on both sides of the Civil War and who engaged in a love affair with a freed slave. Peterson will appear at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on October 27, 2015, at 6:30 p.m.

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Presumed Guilty

Sallie Bissell’s latest Mary Crow mystery revisits a cold case with a ten-year-old victim

September 23, 2015 Every so often, the Pisgah County Police Department reopens the cold case that is colder than any other: the 1989 murder of ten-year-old Teresa Ewing. And when they do, it turns the lives of the people who were once her friends into a nightmare. Sallie Bissell will discuss the latest book in her Mary Crow series, A Judgment of Whispers, at BookManBookWoman in Nashville on October 3, 2015, at 3 p.m.

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Poetic Thrills

Erica Wright demonstrates her range with a debut crime novel

July 20, 2015 The protagonist in Erica Wright’s debut crime thriller, The Red Chameleon, is Kathleen Stone, a retired NYPD cop once on the organized-crime beat. At just twenty-five, Stone is already a veritable has-been, a P.I. who now parlays her gift for disguises into spying on marital philanderers and other seemingly less dangerous pursuits. Then she wanders into her client’s murdered husband in an Upper East Side bar. Erica Wright will appear at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 9-11, 2015. All festival events are free and open to the public.

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