Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Bloodsuckers 1.0

Michael Sims shows off a glittering collection of antique vampire tales

June 6, 2010 Acclaimed nature writer Michael Sims turns his attention to the unnatural world of vampires, compiling a fascinating anthology of Victorian-era tales.

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"Always Upstream or Downstream"

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.

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Ross 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 Delta Blues, an anthology of new stories with contributions from the likes of John Grisham and James Lee Burke.

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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.”

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Shopping 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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