In I’ll Take You There: Exploring Nashville’s Social Justice Sites, editors Amie Thurber and Learotha Williams Jr. collect the contributions of more than 100 Nashvillians to tell stories “about place, power, and the historic and ongoing struggle toward a more just city for all.” I’ll Take You There will be published by Vanderbilt University Press in May 2021.
Combining poetry, commentary, and memoir, The Wheel is the first book by Nashville writer and musician AM Ringwalt. Ringwalt will discuss The Wheel at a virtual event hosted by The Porch in Nashville on March 5 at 6 p.m. CST.
Shuly Xóchitl Cawood’s Trouble Can Be So Beautiful at the Beginning won the 2019 Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry. Cawood is the author of the memoir The Going and Goodbye, the inspirational little book 52 Things I Wish I Could Have Told Myself When I Was 17, and the short story collection A Small Thing to Want. She lives in Johnson City. She’ll appear with Ciona Rouse and Larry Thacker at a virtual event hosted by East Tennessee State University on March 3.
Rachel Louise Martin’s Hot, Hot Chicken: A Nashville Story recounts the story of hot chicken and what the dish’s growing popularity reveals about race relations in a changing city. Hot, Hot Chicken will be published by Vanderbilt University Press in March 2021.
Jesse Graves is the author of four poetry collections, including Basin Ghosts and Specter Mountain, a collaboration with William Wright. His work received the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He teaches at East Tennessee State University, where he is poet-in-residence and professor of English.
Destiny O. Birdsong is a Louisiana-born poet, fiction writer, and essayist. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and the MacDowell Colony and won the Academy of American Poets Prize. She earned her M.F.A. and Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University and lives in Nashville. Birdsong will appear at a virtual event hosted by Parnassus Books in Nashville on October 14.
