July 19, 2010 Bill Friskics-Warrren, Silas House, Amanda Little, Adam Ross, Rebecca Skloot, and Abraham Verghese are popping up all over the news scene:
Music journalist Bill Friskics-Warren, author of I’ll Take You There: Pop Music and the Urge for Transcendence, memorializes Nashville songwriter Hank Cochran in this obituary in The New York Times. “Heartache was Mr. Cochran’s great theme as a songwriter,” he writes.
July 15, 2010 Award-winning novelist and short-story writer Richard Bausch will teach an unusual writing workshop this fall at the University of Memphis, where he holds the Moss Chair of Excellence in English. University students are not eligible for the course; it is open only to members of the community, and aspiring writers who are selected will attend free of charge. Ten to twelve applicants will be chosen. Classes will meet weekly in the evening, beginning the last week of August.
July 12, 2010 This afternoon at 4 p.m. EDT, nonfiction author Michael Sims will be interviewed live on the National Public Radio program Here On Earth. He will discuss his new anthology, Dracula’s Guest: A Connoisseur’s Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories and what he learned, in researching the book, about the natural history of vampires.
July 9, 2010 Morgan Entrekin, a Nashville native and the publisher of Grove/Atlantic Inc. in New York, has been named to PEN American Center’s board of directors. This nonprofit is the U.S. affiliate—and largest branch—of PEN International, “the world’s oldest literary and human rights organization,” according to the PEN American website. PEN is perhaps best known for its annual high-profile literary prizes, which include the PEN/Faulkner Award and the PEN/O. Henry Prize.
July 7, 2010 This has been a big week for Alice Randall, Adam Ross, Michael Sims, and Steve Stern, who are being featured in publications as diverse—and as geographically far-flung—as The New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, and Garden & Gun.
July 2, 2010 On Tuesday, in the fourth stop on his book tour in support of Mr. Peanut, Adam Ross landed at the legendary Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi—arguably the Holy Land of Southern Literature—where, according to the store’s blog, he made an unprecedented impression: “Writers have been speaking and reading at Square Books for thirty years, and we’ve heard just about everything, it would seem. But we’d never heard a reading like this. When Mr. Ross finished, a stunned audience sat speechlessly, then broke into loud applause.” The post concluded: “Today it feels, as it shall in days to come, like an ‘I was there’ moment.”
