Chapter 16 - Part 523

A Griffin for Mattawa?

Khaled Mattawa makes the Griffin Prize shortlist

By Margaret Renkl | April 5, 2011

April 5, 2011 Khaled Mattawa is an international finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry announced today. The other three international finalists are Seamus Heaney, Philip Mosley, and Gjertrud Schnackenberg. The Griffin Prize is one of the most lucrative awards in poetry: each of the finalists will receive an honorarium of 10,000 dollars; the winner, who will be announced on June 1 in Toronto, will receive 65,000 dollars.

Manhunt

On the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Memphis writer Hampton Sides reflects on the man who died

By Margaret Renkl | April 4, 2011

April 4, 2011 Martin Luther King Jr. died on April 4, 1968, when a single shot fired from a flophouse across the street felled him as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Writer Hampton Sides was six years old when King was murdered, a story he tells in his recent book of narrative nonfiction, Hellhound on His Trail.

Compassionate Crusader

Author and environmentalist Scott Russell Sanders talks with Chapter 16

By Paul V. Griffith | April 4, 2011

April 4, 2011 ”A good book appeals to what is best in us,” Scott Russell Sanders has said, and his many fiction and nonfiction titles certainly call to our better angels. In his recent books, A Private History of Awe, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and A Conservationist Manifesto, Sanders examines such issues as environmental responsibility, social justice, the interrelatedness of geography and culture, and spiritual yearning. Next week, he will be in Nashville to headline this year’s Wendell Berry Lecture Series, sponsored by the Nashville Tree Foundation, and in Chattanooga to accept the 2011 Cecil Woods Award for Nonfiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. In a recent email exchange with Chapter 16, Professor Sanders discussed, among other things, his vision for a culture based on caretaking rather than consumerism. Sanders will speak at 5 p.m. on April 13 in Montgomery Bell Academy’s Paschall Theater in Nashville, and at 2:30 p.m. on April 15 at the Conference on Southern Literature in Chattanooga.

Home is a Long Way From Here

Linda Leaming writes a fascinating memoir about finding herself, and a family, in Bhutan

By Liz Garrigan | April 1, 2011

April 1, 2011 Years ago, when Linda Leaming first saw photos of a friend’s trip to the Himalayan country of Bhutan, wanderlust trumped prudence, and she decided to see this overlooked dot on the map for herself. Once there, she stayed for more than a decade. Married to Bhutan: How One Woman Got Lost, Said “I Do” and Found Bliss is equal parts diary, travel guide, and history lesson—Leaming’s tribute to a culture arguably more evolved than our own. Linda Leaming will sign copies of the book from 5 to 8 p.m. on April 7 at Nashville’s Cumberland Gallery. Artwork by Leaming’s husband, Bhutanese artist Phurba Namgay, will be on display.

The Literary Majesty of the King James

Bobby C. Rogers talks about learning to be a poet while wearing a clip-on tie

By Charlotte Pence | March 30, 2011

March 30, 2011 Bobby Rogers’s debut collection of poems harnesses much of its power through the contraries it explores: realism and idealism, bitterness and hope, knowledge and mystery. Articulate, precise, and intense, Paper Anniversary delivers poem after poem that, in the words of the author, provide “a certain kind of attention and a desire to make sense of what it reveals.” Bobby C. Rogers will read from Paper Anniversary on April 4 at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

Keeping Alive the Notion of Song

Dolen Perkins-Valdez pays tribute to the black wives of history

By Margaret Renkl | March 30, 2011

March 30, 2011 When Dolen Perkins-Valdez was young woman, she had no use for the real housewives of Memphis, Tennessee. In a new essay for Black voices, she writes, “When I was younger, in moments of my most impertinent, most naive arrogance, I wondered why my extraordinarily intelligent mother decided to become a housewife. Why didn’t she do more with her great gifts? It was Alice Walker’s groundbreaking 1974 essay ‘In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens’ that matured me on this subject.

Tender Headed (National Poetry Series)

By Olatunde Osinaike
Akashic Books
80 pages
17.95

“In Tender Headed, Olatunde Osinaike asks the question, what makes a man, and what makes a man like me? As he interrogates the inner and outer workings of masculinity in all its sharp and tender parts, and the way a Black man meets the world, his poems strut and duck and weave across their pages. These poems unpack the ingredients of being and make a meal of language.”

~ Camille Rankine, author of Incorrect Merciful Impulses