Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Time Travel with McCarthy

An outdoor homage to Suttree and Knoxville’s past

On July 8 at Knoxville’s Lakeshore Park, “Suttree’s Knoxville: A Hymn to the Past in Film & Music” will combine live music, readings from Cormac McCarthy’s novel Suttree, and a film of archival footage to evoke a sense of the city as it was 70 years ago.

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Costly Redemption

William Gay’s Fugitives of the Heart is an homage to Twain

Times are hard for the characters who populate William Gay’s Fugitives of the Heart, the last in a string of posthumous novels pieced together by his friends from an attic full of scenes Gay left behind. For J.M. White, Sonny Brewer, and the other writers who figured out how the scenes fit together, the effort was worth it, a forensic labor of love they feel even now for a writer who died in 2012.

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Our Town

I’ll Take You There is a collaborative guide to places in Nashville shaped by social justice work

I’ll Take You There, edited by Amie Thurber and Learotha Williams Jr. and written by more than 100 local contributors, guides readers to Nashville places shaped by resistance to power and injustice.

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Guiding Us Through Grief

With gratitude for Edward Hirsch and his expansive body of work

With over 2.7 million lives lost worldwide in just one year, due to the COVID-19 pandemic — nearly 550,000 in the United States alone — there are few poets whose work is more suited to guide us through this overwhelming grief than Edward Hirsch, who has said, “We need poetry to help us transform the oceanic depths of feeling into art.” Hirsch will appear at a virtual event hosted by Vanderbilt University on April 8.

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Power in the Word

Southern Word connects young people to their voices, each other

Students and recent alumni of Southern Word have published books, produced music, given TEDx Talks, been featured on national broadcasts and in newspapers like The New York Times, and even received invitations from Michelle Obama to visit the White House for a student poetry celebration. Southern Word will host the annual BlackLift Poetry House, held online February 20.

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