Michael Ray Taylor’s Hidden Nature: Wild Southern Caves, a mixture of memoir and subterranean natural history, will be published in August 2020. He chairs the communication and theatre arts department at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas.
Sheree Renée Thomas is an award-winning short story writer, poet, and editor. She edited the Dark Matter speculative fiction anthologies, which won two World Fantasy Awards. Her previous books include Sleeping Under the Tree of Life and Shotgun Lullabies. Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future is her first fiction collection. She lives in her hometown, Memphis.
Last year, Humble Universe Disturbers Used Books and More both opened its doors and changed locations. Now planted firmly on Franklin Street in Clarksville’s developing downtown district, co-owners Aubrey Collins and Ericka Arcadia spoke with Chapter 16 about how they got here and where they’re going.
Kate Daniels is the author of five collections of poetry, including Four Testimonies and A Walk in Victoria’s Secret. She lives in Nashville, where she directs the creative-writing program at Vanderbilt University. “In the Midst of the Heroin Epidemic” will appear in her forthcoming collection, In the Months of My Son’s Recovery, which will be published by Louisiana State University Press on May 15, 2019.
Appalachian Reckoning is a collection of regional responses to J.D. Vance’s controversial bestselling memoir, Appalachian Elegy. In this essay from the book, Kingsport native Robert Gipe, author of Trampoline and Weedeater, writes with humor and compassion about the town where he grew up, the industries that made people sick there, and the people he knew. Appalachian Reckoning will be published by West Virginia University Press on March 1, 2019.
In the dead of winter, outside a small Minnesota town, state troopers pull two young women and their car from the icy Black Root River. One is found downriver, drowned, while the other is found at the scene—half frozen but alive. The Current, a new literary thriller by former Memphis novelist Tim Johnston, will be published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill on January 22, 2019.
