Chapter 16 - Part 601

Capturing Presidents

In Nashville to accept the Nashville Public Library Literary Award, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian talks with Chapter 16 about the past, the present, and the World Series

By Michael Ray Taylor | November 5, 2009

Last year, when Barack Obama appointed his chief Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, the media widely reported that his decision had been influenced by reading Team of Rivals, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Abraham Lincoln, which emphasized the way Lincoln led by drawing together his opponents. But bestselling historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has been influencing political leaders with her knowledge of the past for years. She talks with Chapter 16 about her career—and her visit to Nashville.

Another Mother's Day

John Carter Cash writes a new tribute—this time a picture book for children—to his mother June

By Margaret Renkl | November 5, 2009

John Carter Cash is Grammy-winning music producer. He has worked on albums by virtually everyone in the Nashville pantheon—stars like Loretta Lynn, George Jones, Kris Kristofferson, Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson, Rosanne Cash, Vince Gill, and John Prine—but he’s still best known as the only child of Johnny Cash and June Carter. In 2007, Cash published a biography of his mother, Anchored in Love: An Intimate Portrait of June Carter Cash, and earlier this year he brought out a children’s book inspired by her, as well. He talks with Chapter 16 about his mother, his wife, his children—and his next book.

"Before the Flood: A Solo From New Orleans"

By Diann Blakely | November 5, 2009

Diann Blakely, the author of three poetry collections, is a graduate of both the University of the South and Vanderbilt University. She studied at New York University, Harvard, and Boston University before earning an MFA from Vermont College. While still a work in progress, Cities of Flesh and the Dead, from which this poem is excerpted, won the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award.

"17 Tomato Haiku"

By John Egerton | November 4, 2009

John Egerton is an independent journalist and nonfiction author who lives in Nashville, Tennessee. His books include The Americanization of Dixie (1974), Generations (1983), Southern Food (1987), and Speak Now Against the Day (1994), for which he received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. His only work of fiction, Ali Dubyiah and the Forty Thieves, is a political satire.

"Paternoster"

By Beth Bachmann | November 2, 2009

Beth Bachmann‘s first book, Temper, won the AWP Award Series 2008 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, and Tin House, among other journals. She teaches creative writing at Vanderbilt University.

"Packing Light"

By Marilyn Kallet | November 2, 2009

Marilyn Kallet is the author of 14 books, which include translations, children’s books, personal essays, literary criticism, and anthologies of women’s writing. She teaches creative writing at the University of Tennessee, as well as poetry-writing workshops in Auvillar, France, for the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Distant Sons

Tim Johnston
Algonquin Books
400 pages
$29

“Tim Johnston has once again raised the bar for the literary thriller. Distant Sons is elegant and edgy, refined and complex. It excavates the truth from the darkest recesses of the past and shines a light towards the possibility of a redemptive future.”

~ Ivy Pochoda, author of These Women and Sing Her Down