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.
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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.
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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.
Read moreIn this session from the 2009 Southern Festival of Books, Kathryn Stockett reads from and discusses her novel, The Help, talks about the novel’s international readership, and confesses her childhood fear of the school librarian. This session was recorded live at the War Memorial Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee on October 10, 2009. For more podcasts, visit our feed at www.chapter16.org/podcast.xml
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Tom Piazza makes a perilous Opry run with bluegrass legend Jimmy Martin
In the day, country music characters like Grandpa Jones, Mel Tillis, and George Jones left a wake of hilarious, poignant, and bawdy tales that Music Row insiders passed around like baseball cards. Of these, none were more often repeated than those involving self-proclaimed “King of Bluegrass” Jimmy Martin, a notorious loose canon. In 1998 music writer Tom Piazza followed Martin on a harrowing visit to the Grand Ole Opry, during which the inebriated singer came close to fisticuffs with at least two members of that venerable institution. Ten years after appearing in The Oxford American, the resulting article, “True Adventures with the King of Bluegrass,” is now available in paperback.
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Novelist William Gay talks with Chapter 16 about his books, his beginnings, and why he writes better in Hohenwald than anywhere else on earth
In just over a decade, William Gay has gone from being an unpublished drywall hanger to one of Tennessee’s most acclaimed living writers. Often compared to William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, and Thomas Wolfe, Gay was born in 1943 in Hohenwald, Tennessee. After living in New York and Chicago in the 1960s and ’70s, he returned to his hometown—where he still lives—to work in construction by day and write fiction by night. His first novel, The Long Home, won the 1999 James A. Michener Memorial Prize. He subsequently published two novels, Provinces of Night and Twilight, and a book of short stories, I Hate to See that Evening Sun Go Down. In 2007 Gay was named a USA Ford Foundation Fellow, and in 2010 he will publish his fourth novel, The Lost Country.
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