Poet Nikki Giovanni is still speaking her mind
January 17, 2011 Since she first gained attention in the late 1960s with fiery screeds like “The Great Pax Whitie,” Nikki Giovanni has been both one of America’s most popular poets and a cultural leader in the African American community. Now in her fifth decade of literary prominence, Giovanni is still pursuing her craft, her passion for education, and her penchant for speaking her mind.
Read moreJon Meacham enters the gun debate
January 17, 2011 Chattanooga native Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a biography of Andrew Jackson, knows his way around a gun cabinet, according to an editorial Meacham delivered last Friday night on the PBS program Need to Know, which he co-hosts: “My father gave me a .22 rifle when I was 9 and a single barrel .410 shotgun when I was 10. I have inherited many of my family’s guns, including a rifle made by my great, great, great grandfather, which I will preserve and give to my son.
Read moreHampton Sides sees parallels between Jared Loughner and James Earl Ray
January 17, 2011 The most recent book by Memphis native Hampton Sides is a nonfiction story that reads like a novel. As the author of Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin, Sides spent years considering the psyche of the kind of angry, unbalanced man who might aim a gun at a civic leader. Sides sees a lot of James Earl Ray in Jared Loughner, the man who shot Representative Gabrielle Richards outside a Tuscon grocery store:
Read moreDebut YA author Ruta Sepetys is bringing in the starred reviews
January 13, 2011 Debut novelist Ruta Sepetys has pulled off a hat trick with her YA novel, Shades of Gray: starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Kirkus Reviews. A historical novel set in Russia during Stalin’s reign of terror, the book addresses “a topic woefully underdiscussed in English-language children’s fiction,” according to Kirkus.
Read more
Death-penalty opponent Margaret Vandiver talks with Chapter 16 about the future of capital punishment in the Volunteer State
January 12, 2011 In their essay collection, Tennessee’s New Abolitionists, editors Amy L. Sayward and Margaret Vandiver document efforts to halt capital punishment in Tennessee. In an email interview with Chapter 16, Vandiver, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Memphis, weighs in on the future of capital punishment in the Volunteer State. Vandiver and contributor Pete Gathje, a professor of Christian ethics at Memphis Theological Seminary, will read from Tennessee’s New Abolitionists at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on January 15 at 1 p.m.
Read more
Jonathan Rogers’s new YA novel reads like a well-loved folk tale
January 11, 2011 The protagonist in Jonathan Rogers’s latest young-adult novel, The Charlatan’s Boy, is Grady, a twelve-year-old orphan who doesn’t “have any idea who I was or where I come from.” He doesn’t even have a last name. For much of his life, Grady has traveled from village to village alongside “full-bloomed scoundrel” Floyd Wendellson. Together they put on a circus-freak-show performance, with Floyd as the showman ringmaster and Grady “The Wild Man of the Feechiefen Swamp.” Dressed in “muskrat and possum hides,” his face covered in mud, Grady pretends to be one of the Feechiefolk, a mythical group of people who live in the swampy “black waters of the Feechiefen.”
Read more
