Katy Simpson Smith’s The Weeds links the stories of two women botanists
Katy Simpson Smith’s The Weeds links the stories of two unnamed women, working in different centuries, who both find themselves apprenticed to male botanists cataloguing every species of plant growing among the stones of the Roman Colosseum.
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Poet Anna Laura Reeve entwines motherhood with the natural world in her luminous debut collection
In her debut collection, Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility, poet Anna Laura Reeve depicts motherhood with startling honesty and insight, enmeshed with experiences of the natural world and the enduring drive to make art. Reeve will discuss the book at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on April 16.
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What Things Cost offers a moving tribute to our nation’s working poor
What Things Cost: an anthology for the people is a landmark collection of labor writing. Editors Rebecca Gayle Howell and Ashley M. Jones center the unsung voices of laborers whose work has been devalued or ignored.
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Moments of internal reckoning resonate in three recent poetry collections
In three recent poetry collections by Tennessee authors, moments of internal reckoning take center stage. Katherine Smith’s Secret City, Darius Stewart’s Intimacies in Borrowed Light, and Tyler Friend’s Him or Her or Whatever all foreground highly subjective perspectives in resonant conflict with the world around them.
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Novelist Charles Dodd White discusses a pivotal year in his life as a writer
During the past year, Knoxville writer Charles Dodd White has seen three books published — a feat that would be a high point for any writer’s career. In a recent email exchange with Chapter 16, he discusses how this body of work came to be and contemplates the future of his writing life.
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A young woman learns to fight for her adopted hometown in Moonrise Over New Jessup
In Jamila Minnicks’ debut novel, Moonrise Over New Jessup, Alice Young takes on a new life of love and tangled loyalties in an all-Black Alabama town embroiled in the escalating fight over desegregation.
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