In My Black Country, Alice Randall outlines the inclination of Music Row institutions to discount Black writers and their insistence on erasure of Black artists, particularly women, in the genre. Randall will appear in Nashville at Parnassus Books on April 12 and at City Winery, as part of “An Evening with Black Opry,” on April 25.
The poems in Darnell Arnoult’s Incantations investigate the complexities of human and ethereal existence, mapping the paradoxes of life.
Poet and wildlife biologist J. Drew Lanham calls humanity to embrace the wild possibilities of a better way of living in Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves.
Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare in Bloomsbury surveys the variety of ways English modernists used the Bard to inspire their own work. Garber will appear at Novel in Memphis on April 11. For a complete list of Garber’s events during her April 10–12 visit to Memphis, please see the Shakespeare at Rhodes website: www.rhodes.edu/shakespeare
Operation Pied Piper, initiated by the British government in September 1939, relocated thousands of children in an effort to protect them from war bombing. In Patti Callahan Henry’s novel The Secret Book of Flora Lea, young sisters Hazel and Flora find themselves displaced with so many others, thrust into a terrifying adventure. Henry will appear at the East Tennessee History Center in Knoxville on April 2.
Poet Ross Gay returns to finding joy in the everyday with his latest essay collection, The Book of (More) Delights. Gay will appear at a fundraiser for The Porch in Nashville on April 5 and will give a free reading at the downtown branch of the Nashville Public Library on April 6.
