Award-winning author Derrick Barnes’ latest book, The King of Kindergarten, celebrates the joy and pride of a child’s first day of school. Barnes will appear at the 2019 Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville on October 11-13.
In Better Than the Best Plan, Lauren Morrill’s teenage protagonist finds herself unexpectedly tossed into the foster care system.
House of Salt and Sorrows follows a young heiress as she grapples with a mysterious family curse. Erin A. Craig will discuss the book at Novel in Memphis on August 6 and Parnassus Books in Nashville on August 24.
As she was coming of age in Nashville in the 1950s, there were many places award-winning children’s author Patricia McKissack was not allowed to go. She remembers hotels and restaurants that forbade African Americans entry, and movie theaters with a separate doorway in the alley for black patrons. The farthest reaches of the Grand Ole Opry’s balcony, known as the buzzard’s roost, was the only seating open to African Americans, McKissack recalls. She never partook: “My grandfather said that watermelons would bloom in January if any of his children went down there. ‘We don’t sit in no buzzard’s roost,’ he said. ‘We’re human beings, not buzzards.'”
Quiver, Julia Watts’s new novel for teens, is a story of acceptance against all odds.
Old Crow Medicine Show frontman Ketch Secor and illustrator Higgins Bond discuss their new picture book, Lorraine.
