Looking Back on 50 Years of Tennessee Books
Abundant Goodness
A Committed Conservative
She’s on the Bird
Good Sport
Chapter 16
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Social Death and Its Afterlives

Lisa Guenther contemplates solitary confinement—historically, socially, and philosophically

By Ralph Bowden |

January 9, 2014 Nashville author Lisa Guenther, an associate professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, describes solitary confinement as “one of the simplest and most devastating” ways to destroy a person. In her exhaustive new book, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives, Guenther gives an historical overview of solitary confinement in the U.S., discusses theories concerning its use, and examines the role of race in its application.

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The Particulars of Evil

Sue Monk Kidd heads to Nashville to read from her new novel set in pre-Civil War Charleston

By Tina LoTufo |

January 8, 2014 Sue Monk Kidd’s bestselling 2004 novel, The Secret Life of Bees, is set against the backdrop of the burgeoning civil-rights movement. In The Invention of Wings Kidd turns the clock back further—to the slave-holding South prior to the Civil War. Kidd will discuss the book at 6:15 p.m. on January 15, 2014, at the Nashville Public Library, as part of the Salon@615 series.

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Switching Sides

Glenn Feldman explains how the once-blue South turned red

By Michael Ray Taylor |

January 7, 2014 “The South began its move toward the modern Republican party in 1865,” writes Glenn Feldman in the opening sentence of his new book, The Irony of the Solid South: Democrats, Republicans, and Race, 1865-1944. Feldman, who earned a master’s degree in political science at Vanderbilt, spends the rest of the book backing up this surprising statement with overwhelming historical evidence.

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New Anthology Spotlights Tennessee Poets

The Southern Poetry Anthology series turns toward Tennessee

By Quincy Rhoads |

January 6, 2013 The literary culture of Tennessee is as varied as the landscape of the state, and The Southern Poetry Anthology captures this diversity in the breadth of its selections. From West Tennessee’s Lisa Roney to East Tennessee’s Jeff Daniel Marion, and from nationally celebrated poets like Charles Wright to less familiar talents like Jeff Hardin and Kevin Thomason, the anthology includes a broad array of talent.

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From “A Map of the Lost World”

By Rick Hilles |

December 13, 2013 Rick Hilles has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, a Camargo Fellowship, and, most recently, a 2013 Individual Artist Fellowship in Poetry from the Tennessee Arts Commission. He is the author of Brother Salvage, winner of the 2005 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and A Map of the Lost World (2012), and his poems have been published widely in literary magazines. He lives in Nashville and teaches poetry at Vanderbilt University. Hilles will read from his work on December 19, 2013, at 7 p.m. at the Scarritt-Bennett Center in Nashville. The event is free and open to the public.

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