Jamey Hatley has received a total of $55,000 this year from the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and the National Endowment for the Arts to work on her first novel, The Dream-Singers. The book is set in Memphis, beginning with the birth of twins in 1968—one born as Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his final speech and the other when he is assassinated.
Salvage the Bones, a National Book Award winner, is the featured title for this year’s Memphis Reads program, and author Jesmyn Ward will be in Memphis to discuss the novel, which is narrated by a pregnant fifteen-year-old whose destitute family faces the arrival of Hurricane Katrina. Ward will speak at Christian Brothers University on September 28 at 7 p.m., and at Rhodes College on September 29 at 6 p.m.
Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff’s third novel, was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in fiction. Groff will be among seventy writers at the 2016 Mid-South Book Festival, held in Memphis September 9-11, 2016. Today she speaks with Chapter 16 about marriage, the trials of portraying anger and death in fiction, and the pleasures of writing in longhand.
Set in Cape Canaveral in the late twentieth century, Patrick Ryan’s stories conjure a rich variety of intriguing souls, from a pregnant teen who wants to be Miss America to a gay sixteen-year-old with a crush on an ex-astronaut. Ryan will discuss The Dream Life of Astronauts in conversation with Ann Patchett at Parnassus Books in Nashville on July 19, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.
May 6, 2016 Syndicated columnist Rheta Grimsley Johnson will talk about The Dogs Buried Over the Bridge: A Memoir in Dog Years, at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on May 10, 2016, at 6:30 p.m. and at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on May 15, 2016, at 2 p.m. The book chronicles Johnson’s loves, losses, and Mississippi home life by way of the dogs who shared the journey.
April 11, 2016 Bestselling novelist Ann Packer will appear at The Skillery in Nashville on April 14, 2016, at 6:30 p.m. to read from and sign The Children’s Crusade, released this month in paperback. The novel, about a family that puts down roots in the 1950s in a wooded area that will become Silicon Valley, shifts among narratives by four siblings, each affected by the chemistry of their mother’s indifference and their father’s devotion.
