Margaret Renkl

Marshall Chapman wraps her first movie, Love Don’t Let Me Down; the Los Angeles Times salutes Richard Bausch‘s Something Is Out There; and Ann Patchett‘s 2001 novel Bel Canto finally reaches the stage.

Nashville debut novelist Adam Ross is keeping Stephen King up at night, Jon Meacham adds a weekly television show to his to-do list, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks hits the number-two slot on The New York Times bestseller list—and its author, Rebecca Skloot, is tapped for an appearance on The Colbert Report.

With new books by Memphis authors Richard Bausch, Molly Caldwell Crosby, Dolen Perkins-Valdez, and the Publishing Juggernaut Formerly Known As Rebecca Skloot now garnering national coverage, Tennessee’s River City is enjoying a season in the literary sun.

Last fall, Poets & Writers named Vanderbilt University one of the top twenty creative-writing programs in the nation. Two weeks ago Beth Bachmann, a poet in the creative-writing program at Vanderbilt, learned she had won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for her book, Temper. Last week, the Blues Foundation announced that Vanderbilt nonfiction writer-in-residence Peter Guralnick would be inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame. This week the PEN/Faulkner Foundation named five fiction finalists for 2010, and Lorraine Lopez, author of the story collection Homicide Survivors Picnic, was on the short list. Care to guess where she teaches?