“Weapons, or What I Have Taken in My Hand to Speak When I Have No Words”
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Joy Harjo, who served three terms as U.S. Poet Laureate, is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee Creek Nation.
2020 Southern Festival of Books
Saving What Remains
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.
Doing the Work
Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry, Nikky Finney’s first new collection in nearly 10 years, demonstrates how the National Book Award-winning poet continues to push herself and expand our idea of poetry’s scope. Finney will appear at the 2022 Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, March 24-27.
Stepping into Their Own Power
In Destiny O. Birdsong’s triptych novel, Nobody’s Magic, three Black women with albinism negotiate a racially complicated world. Birdsong will discuss Nobody’s Magic at a virtual event hosted by Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 8.
Radical Joy
In Alice Randall’s fifth novel, Black Bottom Saints, a terminally ill columnist, club impresario, and dance school founder dictates tender hagiographies of the Black creatives who built and nurtured a thriving community in mid-20th-century Detroit. Randall will take part in the presentation of the 2021 John Egerton Prize, awarded by the Southern Foodways Alliance at an online session of the 2021 Southern Festival of Books on October 7.
The Whole of a Life
In her vibrant new novel, Dear Ann, Bobbie Ann Mason imagines the life that might have been for Ann Workman, a graduate student who pursues love and English literature against the turbulent backdrop of the 1960s. Bobbie Ann Mason will appear at the online 2021 Southern Festival of Books on October 9.
