March 1, 2011 When floods devastated Middle Tennessee last May, three Nashville YA novelists launched “Do the Write Thing for Nashville,” an online auction to benefit flood victims. The concept was simple. Writers, agents, editors, and bookstore owners donated items of literary interest for book lovers to bid on by leaving a comment. The last comment placed before the auction closed was the winner, and money was collected by PayPal.

February 25, 2011 Years ago, when Nashville novelist Alice Randall–author, most recently, of Rebel Yell–read bedtime stories to her daughter Caroline, she fielded a lot of questions about the way African-American characters were portrayed in children’s literature:

February 24, 2011 Come Sunday, Memphis native Heather Armstrong will have been blogging for ten years. In other words, Armstrong launched Dooce.com long before most Americans had ever heard the word blog, and long, long before the blogosphere upended American politics and recreated the news cycle.

February 24, 2011 Screenwriter John Fusco is adapting Peter Guralnick’s 1994 biography, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley, for Fox 2000, reports Deadline New York. The project has been planned for more than a decade but is only just now getting off the ground.

February 23, 2011 Khaled Mattawa was thirteen when Muammar Gaddafi’s forces began hanging “traitors” in Mattawa’s home city of Benghazi. The next year Mattawa left his native Libya, accompanied only by his eighteen-year-old brother, to move to the U.S., where opportunities were plentiful and dictators were conspicuously absent. Mattawa’s parents and four younger sisters stayed behind. Because of Gaddafi’s suspicion of ex-pats, Mattawa could not return. He didn’t see the rest of his family again for twenty-one years.