Children & YA | Chapter 16

Affrilachia from A to Z

Frank X Walker’s new picture book pays tribute to Black life in Appalachia

By Julie Danielson | March 15, 2023

Frank X Walker’s A Is for Affrilachia, illustrated by upfromsumdirt, is a picture book for all ages.

A March to the Mountaintop

Alice Faye Duncan’s picture book tells the story of MLK’s last days in Memphis

By Sarah Carter | February 17, 2023

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Alice Faye Duncan’s award-winning 2018 picture book, Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop, offers children an account of the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Sweet Dreams

In lyrical rhyme, Jessica Young’s I’ll Meet You in Your Dreams celebrates the parent-child bond

By Julie Danielson | March 4, 2021

Jessica Young’s latest picture book, I’ll Meet You in Your Dreams, celebrates the parent-child bond, while simultaneously honoring children’s need to spread their wings. Young and illustrator Rafael López will celebrate the launch of I’ll Meet You in Your Dreams at a virtual event hosted by Parnassus Books in Nashville on March 9.

Bringing Justice to Young Readers

Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor talks with Chapter 16 about her two new books for children

By Julie Danielson | July 3, 2020

In an interview conducted prior to her visit to the 2018 Southern Festival of Books, The Honorable Sonia Sotomayor, an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, discussed her books for young readers, Turning Pages: My Life Story and The Beloved World of Sonia Sotomayor.

Serious Funnies

Comic artist Gene Luen Yang talks with Chapter 16 about getting graphic in school

By Joe Nolan | July 2, 2020

In this 2013 interview, artist and author Gene Luen Yang discusses the evolution of the graphic novel. Yang’s own autobiographical book, American Born Chinese, was the first graphic novel nominated for a National Book Award and the first to win the American Library Association’s Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in young-adult literature.

Fake It Till You Make It

A junior entrepreneur and a budding drag queen set their sights on stardom

By Tracy Barrett | February 5, 2020

In Greg Howard’s second middle-grade novel, Middle School’s a Drag: You Better Werk!, entrepreneurial pre-teen Mikey Pruitt thinks his new talent agency can’t miss, now that he’s representing an eighth-grade aspiring drag queen. Readers won’t be surprised to find out that things don’t go as smoothly as Mikey anticipates. Howard will discuss the book at Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 11, at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on February 13, and at the SE-YA Book Fest in Murfreesboro on March 12-14.

The Civil War Letters of Sarah Kennedy: Life Under Occupation in the Upper South

Edited by Minoa Uffelman, Ellen Kanervo, and Phyllis Smith
University of Tennessee Press
208 pages
$29.95

“A useful volume to Civil War historians and women’s history scholars alike, The Civil War Letters of Sarah Kennedy pulls back the curtain on upper-middle-class family life and social relations in a mid-sized Middle Tennessee town during the Civil War and reveals the slow demise of slavery during the Union occupation.”

~ the publisher