September 27, 2010 Poet Claudia Emerson explored the painful terrain of divorce in her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Late Wife. Her newest collection, Figure Studies, looks at the gender “schooling” of young women and its impact on their lives. She answered questions from Chapter 16 by email prior to her public reading on September 27 at 7 pm. at the University of Tennessee Library in Knoxville.
September 15, 2010 Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets brings together a group of accomplished writers to discuss the mysterious craft of writing poetry. Poet and Austin Peay professor Blas Falconer, one of the book’s editors, speaks to Chapter 16 about the collection, and about his own creative process.
September 1, 2010 In 1999, an Oberlin, Ohio, mother named Cynthia Stewart took a few pictures of her eight-year-old daughter playing in the bathtub, little knowing that they would lead to her indictment on child-pornography charges. In Framing Innocence, author Lynn Powell tells the story of Cynthia Stewart’s ordeal—and of the community that came to her defense.
August 26, 2010 Bill Brown has combined a lifelong vocation as a poet with a distinguished teaching career, including twenty years at Nashville’s Hume-Fogg Academic Magnet high school. He recently published his fourth collection of poems, The News Inside. He answered questions about his earliest efforts as a poet, his philosophy of teaching, and the future of poetry in the Internet age.
August 20, 2010 I’ve never had a baby, or a kidney stone, or even a broken leg; the brain-spearing throb of a bad tooth is about the closest thing to agony I’ve ever known. I’m not especially fond of agony, so all my adult life I’ve trotted off to the dentist every six months, in the naïve belief that check-ups would save me from ever again experiencing the dental nightmares I endured as a kid. But no. The tooth demon paid a call over the last long holiday weekend, which I spent gobbling Advil and watching with horror as the right side of my face puffed up like a bullfrog’s throat. Bright and early on the first day office hours resumed, I was reclining in the dental chair, contemplating my complicated relationship with authority and pain.
August 17, 2010 Memphis native Eric Jerome Dickey has been turning out fast-paced, sexy, wildly popular novels since 1996. His latest, Tempted by Trouble, puts a timely twist on the thriller genre with a protagonist driven to crime by the economic downturn. Prior to his book signings this month in Memphis and Nashville, Dickey answered questions from Chapter 16 about the work that goes into his remarkably successful books, and about the mysterious appeal of his violent, morally compromised characters.
