Thomas Alan Holmes is a professor of English at East Tennessee State University. In the Backhoe’s Shadow is his first collection of poetry. He’ll read from his work at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on September 11 and at the 2022 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 14-16.
“The play’s the thing” in Twelfth, Janet Key’s debut novel for middle-grade readers. It was not 12-year-old Maren Sands’ idea to attend Charlotte Goodman Theater Camp. Now she’s stuck in the middle of the woods with a bunch of theater kids she doesn’t know — and, as it turns out, possibly a ghost. Janet Key will appear at the 2022 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 14-16.
Raised for several years in a religious commune known as The Body, Shawna Kay Rodenberg delves into the complex intersection of religion, femininity, familial expectations, and personal agency in her memoir Kin. Rodenberg will appear with Robert Gipe at the Johnson City Public Library on September 10 and at the 2022 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 14-16.
A Beat Beyond collects a wealth of notes, essays, reviews, and talks written by award-winning poet Major Jackson from 1993 to 2020. Jackson will appear in conversation with Destiny O. Birdsong at Parnassus Books in Nashville on September 1 and at the 2022 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 14-16.
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: In Shift Work, West Tennessee poet Bobby C. Rogers mines the small-town front rooms, farmers’ fields, glass-strewn roadsides, and neglected cityscapes that suffuse the lives and memories of his poems’ many Tennessean characters. Rogers will appear at the 2022 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 14-16.
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: In Mastodons to Mississipians: Adventures in Nashville’s Deep Past, Aaron Deter-Wolf and Tanya M. Peres offer a brief, fascinating survey of the Nashville region’s rich archaeological record and a primer on the human communities that thrived there thousands of years before Timothy Demonbreun arrived. The book is also a plea for preservation of sites under threat from the city’s raging development boom, as well as a sobering acknowledgment of what has already been lost. Aaron Deter-Wolf and Tanya M. Peres will appear at the 2022 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 14-16.
