Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

The Edge of Breath

Annette Sisson’s new poetry collection reminds us that we are living and dying at once

In her latest poetry collection Winter Sharp with Apples, Annette Sisson considers the ordinary but important moments that bind people together. Sisson will appear at The Nocturne Reading Series at Land of a Thousand Hills in Nashville on January 21.

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Feeling Welcome and at Home

Reflections on Berea College

In Lessons from the Foothills, Gretchen Dykstra digs into Berea College’s past and present, from its 19th-century founding by John G. Fee, a Kentucky-born preacher with a dream of an integrated school that served Appalachians, to the school’s myriad challenges today.

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Healing the Healers

A psychiatrist urges healthcare workers to bring their full humanity to the workplace

Part memoir, part argument, and part self-help manual, How Do You Feel? by Dr. Jessi Gold challenges dangerous assumptions, common to the public and healthcare workers alike, about what it means to be a good doctor or nurse.

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America’s Promise

Frank X Walker’s Load in Nine Times gives voice to enslaved and enslaver in Civil War-era Kentucky

Load in Nine Times is Frank X. Walker’s poetic exploration of American life in the period surrounding the Civil War. The collection takes Kentucky as its geographical framework, speaking through enslaved mothers, fathers, and children and masters and mistresses.

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Betrayal and Justice

By the Fire We Carry tells a story of Native American land lost and regained

By the Fire We Carry, by Cherokee journalist Rebecca Nagle, tells how the Five Tribes of frontier history (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole) were dispossessed first of their Southeastern homelands, then of their reservation lands in Oklahoma — until finally, against the odds, they won back their treaty rights in court.

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Not Quite a New Day

Three recent poetry collections seek form and language to reflect an uncertain world

In three recent poetry collections — Blas Falconer’s Rara Avis, Danielle Chapman’s Boxed Juice, and Todd Osborne’s Gatherer — our world’s inherent uncertainty takes center stage, fueling each poet’s inquiry into how our everyday lives (and our deeper internal longings) can survive the unknowable.

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