The New York Times profiles Heather Armstrong as she celebrates the tenth anniversary of Dooce
February 24, 2011 Come Sunday, Memphis native Heather Armstrong will have been blogging for ten years. In other words, Armstrong launched Dooce.com long before most Americans had ever heard the word blog, and long, long before the blogosphere upended American politics and recreated the news cycle.
Read morePeter Guralnick’s biography of Elvis is headed for the big screen
February 24, 2011 Screenwriter John Fusco is adapting Peter Guralnick’s 1994 biography, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley, for Fox 2000, reports Deadline New York. The project has been planned for more than a decade but is only just now getting off the ground.
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Popular blogger Ree Drummond tells the story of her move from L.A. to Oklahoma
February 24, 2011 Ree Drummond’s new book, Black Heels to Tractor Wheels: A Love Story, is both a memoir and the backstory to The Pioneer Woman, one of the most popular blogs on the web. Today Drummond talks with Chapter 16 about the book, which Columbia Pictures is developing as a star vehicle for Nashville native Reese Witherspoon.
Read moreLybian poet Khaled Mattawa weighs in on the revolution
February 23, 2011 Khaled Mattawa was thirteen when Muammar Gaddafi’s forces began hanging “traitors” in Mattawa’s home city of Benghazi. The next year Mattawa left his native Libya, accompanied only by his eighteen-year-old brother, to move to the U.S., where opportunities were plentiful and dictators were conspicuously absent. Mattawa’s parents and four younger sisters stayed behind. Because of Gaddafi’s suspicion of ex-pats, Mattawa could not return. He didn’t see the rest of his family again for twenty-one years.
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Joyce Carol Oates talks about her new memoir
February 23, 2011 Literary titan Joyce Carol Oates is known for the extraordinary virtuosity and prolificacy of her work. In A Widow’s Story: A Memoir, she tells the story of her struggle to cope with the death of her husband of nearly fifty years. Today she answers questions from Chapter 16 about A Widow’s Story and her work as both a writer and a teacher. Oates will give a reading at Austin Peay State University on February 25 at 7:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
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There’s much more to Holly Goddard Jones’s stories than kitchen-sink realism
February 22, 2011 Like Bobbie Ann Mason before her, Holly Goddard Jones entered the literary scene with a much-praised debut collection of stories set in her home state. Jones is no Mason redux, but in Girl Trouble she does look carefully at the Kentucky in which she was raised, tapping into veins similar to those explored by Mason. Set in the fictional small town of Roma, these stories portray with deep sensitivity the emotional injuries of men and women whose lives are etched there. On February 24 at 7 p.m., Holly Goddard Jones will read from her work in Buttrick Hall, Room 102, on the Vanderbilt University campus.
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