Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Art in the Pandemic

Finding joy during difficult times

My museum adventure is an antidote to the emotional numbness that has set in during the pandemic, an escape from an endless Monopoly game of boxes that isolate and bankrupt emotionally.

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Saving What Remains

Poet Natasha Trethewey’s memoir revisits her Mississippi childhood and her mother’s violent death

In Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir, former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey returns to the love and pain of her childhood and the trauma of her mother’s murder. Trethewey will speak at East Tennessee State University on April 6.

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Everyone a Soldier

Historical novelist Amanda McCrina returns to WWII

In The Silent Unseen, YA author Amanda McCrina returns to the setting of her previous novel, Traitor, to look more deeply into Polish and Ukrainian experiences during World War II. McCrina will discuss The Silent Unseen at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 5.

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A Tender, Honest Narrative

Tara Stringfellow’s Memphis weaves a family’s complex stories

Tara M. Stringfellow’s debut novel Memphis opens with the North family tree, simply but beautifully designed. We can’t know where this family is going to take us, but we know there will be complexity and depth. A family tree contains multitudes. Stringfellow will celebrate the book’s release at Novel in Memphis on April 5.

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The Two Souths

Frye Gaillard and Cynthia Tucker explain how Southern politics shaped the modern United States

In The Southernization of America: A Story of Democracy in the Balance, Frye Gaillard and Cynthia Tucker see two traditions in the modern political history of the South, with clashing implications for the state of American democracy.

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Daylight till Dark

I wondered why my father never cared for gardening

My father loved his fruit trees, but unlike my mother and grandfather, he took no interest in growing vegetables. One day, a few years before his death, I learned why.

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