Chapter 16 - Part 493

A "Major New Talent"

Knoxville poet Charlotte Pence is a finalist for the Crashaw Prize

By Margaret Renkl | February 22, 2012

February 22, 2012 Charlotte Pence, a Knoxville poet and Chapter 16 contributing writer, has been shortlisted for the prestigious Crashaw Prize, an international award for debut poetry collections written in English. The award, offered by the British house Salt Publishing, is designed to seek out and publish “debut collections of poetry from major new talents.” Pence, a recent Ph.D. graduate of the University of Tennessee’s creative-writing program, is one of thirteen finalists.

Fighting a Monstrous Injustice

Historian Eric Foner talks with Chapter 16 about Abraham Lincoln’s complex views on slavery and race

By Chris Scott | February 21, 2012

February 21, 2012 As a young man in frontier Illinois, Abraham Lincoln became convinced that slavery was wrong. How to end the injustice, and whether to treat the former slaves as equal citizens, were questions Lincoln wrestled with for most of his life. These struggles are the subject of Eric Foner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. On February 23 at 6:30 p.m., Foner will give the Belle McWilliams Lecture in American History in the UC Theater at the University of Memphis.

"This is a Tale of Redemption"

Novelist and Nashville bookstore owner Ann Patchett wows Stephen Colbert with her story

By Margaret Renkl | February 21, 2012

February 21, 2012 If independent booksellers had anything to say about it, Ann Patchett would be canonized. Last month, when she told the story of how she came to open Parnassus Books in Nashville, the Patron Saint of Bookstores got a standing ovation from a packed audience at the Winter Institute of the American Booksellers Association.

A Lin-erick

The New York Times invites Roy Blount Jr. to celebrate the New York Knicks’s Jeremy Lin

By Margaret Renkl | February 20, 2012

February 20, 2012 The sudden fame of point guard Jeremy Lin, who emerged from obscurity this month to lead the New York Knicks in a winning streak, has been dubbed “Linsanity” by punsters in the sports media. It was perhaps inevitable, then, that someone would be inspired to write a “lin-erick,” or to commission one, and if a limerick is called for, the media naturally turn to Roy Blount Jr., a Vanderbilt University graduate whose facility for word play is unmatched among contemporary writers.

The Twang and Flavor of Speech

Poet Jeff Daniel Marion speaks of poetic discoveries in a disappearing rural world

By Jeff Hardin | February 17, 2012

February 15, 2012 Novelist Ron Rash notes that for “twenty-five years Jeff Daniel Marion has eschewed poetic fashion and poetic posturing, going his own way, making poems that are confident enough to speak quietly to us, even gently,” and former Poet Laureate Ted Kooser calls Marion a “master of guileless simplicity.” Marion will read from his work on February 20 at 7 p.m. in the Hodges Library Auditorium at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

First-Person Superlative

Chapter 16 takes a tour through the rave reviews for John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead

By Margaret Renkl | February 16, 2012

February 16, 2012 update John Jeremiah Sullivan, a Sewanee grad, has somehow created for himself what can only be called the best writing job in the whole world. Magazines like GQ and Harper’s and The Paris Review and the Oxford American send him out to report on all manner of subjects high and low: cave paintings on the Cumberland Plateau, the grotesque celebrity afterlife of Real World stars, Christian-rock concerts, the waning days of the last living Fugitive, scientific opinion about the future of the human race. Sullivan does more than merely report on what he finds, and does more than merely tell the story in an outrageously original way that involves a page-to-out-loud-laughter ratio of something like 1:1. He also manages the kind of alchemy that all great writing ultimately achieves: John Jeremiah Sullivan transforms every subject he writes about into himself, and himself into the subject, and somehow the reader, too, gets transformed along the way.

I Gotta Sing!

By Alice Faye Duncan
WaterBrook
40 pages
$14.99

“A whole barnyard makes noise ‘in the Spirit of joy’ throughout this raucous picture book, a sweetly heartwarming sing-along by Duncan. Kellam conveys comfort and happiness as the loved ones reflect sunny enthusiasm in this gladdening rendition of the Black American religious folk song ‘I’m Goin’a Sing When the Spirit Says Sing.’”

~Publishers Weekly