Leigh Ann Gardner documents Tennessee’s African American lodges and cemeteries
…African Americans could gather in their communities. Lodges are interesting in that they drew people from all economic classes, all educational backgrounds, and all religious denominations to come together for…
Capturing the Drive-By Truckers on the page
…called Gangstabilly and Pizza Deliverance? But it’s not enough to say the album made the band. It was essential to their survival and to everything that followed. And back in…
Playwright and poet Dan O’Brien searches for meaning in the chaos of trauma
…Our Cancers, by the cancer diagnoses both O’Brien and his wife, actor and writer Jessica St. Clair, received six years ago. They also touch on his childhood and the experience…
Rob Nixon discusses writers, activists, and the challenges of the Global South
…the famous book Silent Spring, as an inspiration. What can Carson’s example teach us? Nixon: Because of her familial responsibilities as a caregiver and breadwinner, Carson never had the chance…
Bradley Sides’ debut collection delivers sincerely strange stories
…two of the collection’s most stylistically distinct stories, he waits as long as possible to reveal exactly how the real communicates with the magical. Throughout “A Complicated Correspondence,” two buddies…
Ed Tarkington talks about the class conflicts at the heart of his second novel, The Fortunate Ones
…tony Belle Meade society. Decades after graduation, Yeatman will pull everyone’s orbit in the political space, whether candidate or backer, community activist or — in Vanessa’s case — veneered wife….
