In his recent novels, Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Powers invites us to set down the blinkered limitations of human perspectives and connect to the natural world in deeper, more urgent ways. Now, with Playground, Powers brings his inimitable storytelling to Earth’s subterranean depths, illuminating the abundant riches of our oceans and the critical dangers they face.
Recently published debut poetry collections from Tara M. Stringfellow, Ben Groner III, and Stephanie Choi invite us into the particulars of their authors’ imaginative worlds.
In her 2019 debut novel, Holding on to Nothing, Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne creates a fresh, moving story of young lovers in a small East Tennessee town and the myriad forces that trouble them as they set out to make a family. The book has just been released in a new paperback edition
Pushing against narratives of Appalachia that include only white, patriarchal, and heteronormative characterizations, the authors collected in Deviant Hollers: Queering Appalachian Ecologies for a Sustainable Future hope to open up new spaces of possibility for envisioning the region.
In her new picture book, Of Words and Water, Shannon Hitchcock tells the story of underappreciated Appalachian author and environmentalist Wilma Dykeman.
In their recently published collections, poets Denton Loving, Evie Shockley, and Susan O’Dell Underwood each find an original expression for the mingling of past and present that presses at the edges of contemporary life. Susan O’Dell Underwood and Denton Loving will appear at the 2024 Tennessee Mountain Writers Conference in Oak Ridge, April 4-6
