November 14, 2011 It’s not every day that attendees at a poetry reading are asked whether they mind being filmed by an MTV camera crew, but that’s what happened at the opening event of last month’s Meacham Writers’ Workshop in Chattanooga. The reading was held at Chattanooga State Community College, where one of the stars of MTV’s reality show “Teen Mom” is a student. It was an unusual beginning to a three-day conference that is itself unique. The Meacham workshop is held twice each year, primarily on the campus of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

November 10, 2011 Maybe this is simply five months of deprivation talking, but walking into Barnes & Noble at Vanderbilt for the first time feels a bit like visiting the Sistine Chapel. It is, frankly, grand. The new campus store is only 7,000 square feet larger than the old Rand location, but the place feels, for many reasons, about a million times bigger. Inside the new Nashville bookstore, 67,000 trade titles are waiting, along with a total of seventy-nine employees to help readers find new books they’ll love.