April 27, 2011 Khaled Mattawa was five years old when Qaddafi seized power in Libya. In an op-ed piece for The New York Times, Mattawa recalls the unlikely role a dairy plant in his hometown of Misurata has played in the resistance against Qaddafi, and why Libyan forces recently targeted it in a bombing raid:
April 25, 2011 Ann Patchett’s forthcoming novel, State of Wonder, features cannibals and snakes and a Heart of Darkness-like odyssey into an unknown world that leads inexorably to a confrontation with the protagonist’s past. It is thus unlike any other novel Patchett has ever written, and yet it has all the hallmarks of a Patchett novel, nonetheless: written in lucid, almost transparent prose, the new novel offers a page-turning tale about a set of characters who are intensely original and particular, but who are at the same time so recognizable as to be nearly universal. State of Wonder will be released on June 7, and Patchett will read from it on June 28 at the Nashville Public Library as part of the Salon@615 series. Today, Patchett talks candidly about the book and offers an exclusive excerpt for Chapter 16 readers.
April 25, 2011 In its commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, CBS Sunday Morning toured the battlefield at Franklin, where 10,000 soldiers lost their lives in one of the bloodiest battles of the conflict. Their tour guide? Bestselling novelist Robert Hicks, whose debut novel, The Widow of the South, turned Carnton Mansion into a tourist destination. “Something important happened here, this place, and in all the battlefields,” Hicks told CBS.
April 15, 2011 In an interview in the Southern Literary Review, Vanderbilt poet Kate Daniels explains her seemingly unlikely kinship with another great poet associated with the Vanderbilt English Department:
April 14, 2011 The Fellowship of Southern Writers convenes today in Chattanooga for the sixteenth biennial Conference on Southern Literature. For three days, more than fifty members of the Fellowship will gather before a packed audience to read from their work and talk on panels about topics as diverse as writers’ efforts to preserve the Southern environment, the role of mentors in a writer’s development, and Southern politics and Southern literature. They will also give out some coveted awards, and four writers with Tennessee connections are among the honorees this week.
April 13, 2011 Beth Bachmann, an assistant professor in the creative-writing program at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, has won the prestigious Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America. The prize, which carries a stipend of $1,000, is given to a work in progress.
