Taylor Branch is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author of The King Years, a selection of excerpts from his trilogy on the civil-rights movement. Branch will deliver the keynote address of the MLK50 symposium at the University of Memphis Holiday Inn on April 3.
On February 27, the Center for Southern Literary Arts in Memphis will bring novelist Tayari Jones to the stage of the Halloran Centre for Performing Arts to talk about her new book, An American Marriage.
For James P. Carse, people are never not playing in one way or another. How we play—the expectations we bring and the invitations we are open to from moment to moment—is the whole human deal. Carse will give a free public address at Belmont University in Nashville on February 8 as part of Belmont’s Faith and Culture Symposium. The event is free and open to the public.
June 1, 2015 I grew up wanting something I couldn’t name. I was raised in the Reform Jewish “tradition,” though the word here is gross hyperbole. The temple I attended as a kid in Memphis represented a variety of Judaism designed to be invisible, to blend indistinguishably with the Christ-haunted Southern landscape. As a consequence, I was virtually untouched by tradition and had not even an awareness of its absence. Nevertheless, one Sunday, playing hooky from confirmation class, I went exploring the old red brick pile of our temple along with a couple of partners in crime.
June 9, 2011 In the fall of 1980, my parents enrolled me in seventh grade at the Trinity School—a tony, Episcopal private school in Manhattan that was all boys until ninth grade. So my two best new friends, Abe Herman and Kyle Duckworth, were thirteen- year- olds on the cusp of, among other things, coeducation.
April 19, 2011 After a few closing words from Allen Wier, the conference was over, though a few folks lingered to get a last book signed or picture taken. It will be two years before this wonderful group of writers and readers gathers again. That seems like a long wait.
