Margaret Renkl

February 10, 2011 Like many girls in the mountains of East Tennessee, including her own mother, novelist Amy Greene married young and had a baby soon thereafter. But her story does not feature the failed dreams or tragic unhappiness many readers might expect. Instead, Greene remains the happily married mother of two children, and her novel, Bloodroot, was one of the most highly acclaimed books of 2010.

February 7, 2011 Poet Marilyn Kallet, director of the creative-writing program at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, will once again host a poetry workshop in Auvillar, France. The program runs May 14 through May 21 at the Brune gîte, a luxury bed and breakfast in a 12th century village that is, according to Kallet, “one of the hundred most beautiful villages in France.” Read more about this unique program here. Two partial scholarships, as well as a number of discounts, are available.

February 4, 2011 Thanks to enormous pre-publication buzz, former Memphis writer Rebecca Skloot had a bestseller on her hands within a day of launching The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, her nonfiction book about the woman behind the first immortal cell line in medical history. But unlike the pharmaceutical companies who owe many of their most successful drugs to research involving HeLa cells, Skloot was determined from the beginning to make sure that the descendants of Henrietta Lacks would benefit from her own windfall.

January 29, 2011 If you buy your books from Amazon.com, you pay no sales tax; if you buy your books from your friendly neighborhood bookseller– or from the nearest mega-Walmart– you do. That’s because Amazon is a web-only retailer without a physical presence in the state. But if the Internet behemoth opens two massive distributions centers in East Tennessee as planned, it will have one. Nevertheless, Tennessee lawmakers have no plans to require Amazon, which will bring up to 2,000 much-needed jobs to the state, to charge sales tax on books ordered by Tennesseans.

January 29, 2011 For poets, the closest thing to winning the lottery has to be for Garrison Keillor to read their poems on his public radio program, The Writer’s Almanac. Today, Darnell Arnoult, Chapter 16 board member and Writer in Residence at Lincoln Memorial University, won the lottery for the third time when Keillor read her poem, “Psychology Today.” The poem begins,

     Have you ever had
            delusions of grandeur?

January 24, 2011 In the February/March issue of BookForum, author and Chapter 16 contributor Clay Risen reviews a new book by video-game designer Jane McGonigal. Reality Is Broken examines the goals and effectiveness of a unique New York City charter school called Quest to Learn, where students tackle assignments designed to mimic the experience of playing a video game.