July 2, 2010 Jeff Hardin, a native of Savannah, Tennessee, lives in Columbia and is a professor of English at Columbia State Community College. A graduate of Austin Peay State University and the University of Alabama, where he received an MFA degree in creative writing, Hardin is the author of two chapbooks, Deep in the Shallows (GreenTower Press) and The Slow Hill Out (Pudding House), as well as one book-length collection, Fall Sanctuary, recipient of the Nicholas Roerich Prize. His poems have appeared in many journals, including The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, Southwest Review, Poetry Northwest, Poet Lore, Meridian, Southern Poetry Review, and Zone 3. “Always Upstream or Downstream” first appeared in The Florida Review.
Read moreRoss on the Road
On tour, debut novelist Adam Ross is wowing audiences
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.”
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True Blues
In a new anthology, crime writers riff on the music of the Mississippi Delta
July 1, 2010 The raw emotion of the blues meets the rough world of crime fiction in
Remembering Henry
Knoxville writer Katie Allison Granju turns grief into action
July 1, 2010 Knoxville writer Katie Allison Granju wrote the book on parenting. Specifically, she’s co-author of Attachment Parenting: Instinctive Care for Your Baby and Young Child, which in 1999 made “co-sleeping” and “baby-wearing” household terms, and she’s written on the subject for a wide variety of national publications, including The New York Times, Salon, and Babble. When Granju’s 18-year-old son Henry died on May 31 of a brutal beating he sustained during a drug deal gone wrong, every parent who heard the story was forced to face the same thought: “If this could happen to Katie Allison Granju, it could happen to me.”
Read moreShopping is Fundamental
For the next two days, Macy’s customers can help fund local Reading is Fundamental programs
June 30, 2010 Today and tomorrow, Macy’s customers across Tennessee can pay three dollars for a coupon that offers ten dollars off the cost of a fifty-dollar purchase. More importantly, that three-dollar investment goes into the coffers of the national office of Reading Is Fundamental , the largest literacy nonprofit in the U.S., which in turn gives one dollar back to the local RIF chapter. Last year alone, the campaign raised $3.1 million and provided 800,000 kids with 2.5 million books.
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Making It in Music City
Suzanne Supplee’s new YA novel captures the big dreams of small-town teens
June 30, 2010 It’s graduation day, and there’s little that Retta Lee Jones will miss about Starling High School. Nineteen years old and raised in small-town Starling, Tennessee—about two and a half hours outside Nashville—she’s desperate to “get on with my real life”—the life she’s been “staring out the window and daydreaming about all through high school.” The heroine of Suzanne Supplee’s new novel, Somebody Everybody Listens To, Retta has plans—big ones: Retta Lee Jones wants to make it in country music.
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