John T. Edge talks about The Potlikker Papers, the Nashville Reads title for 2018
John T. Edge parses sixty years of Southern history in The Potlikker Papers, the 2018 selection for Nashville Reads, which he’ll discuss at the main branch of the Nashville Public Library on May 1. A panel talk with Caroline Randall Williams, co-author of Soul Food Love, and restaurateurs Sean Brock and Maneet Chauhan will follow.
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Exploring the idea of an American national literature, Jason Richards finds a complex play of imitations
In Imitation Nation: Red, White, and Blackface in Early and Antebellum US Literature, Rhodes College professor Jason Richards brings theoretical sophistication to close readings of some well-known and not so well-known texts in American literature, showing the complexities of cultural imitation before the Civil War.
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Poets Jesse Graves and William Wright merge perspectives in Specter Mountain
Throughout Specter Mountain, Jesse Graves and William Wright’s collaborative poetry collection, the mountain landscape itself emerges as a powerful, haunting source of revelation. The result is a unique contribution to Appalachian literature.
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Joseph Rosenbloom talks with Chapter 16 about the final days of Martin Luther King Jr.
On April 3, Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Memphis to lead a nonviolent march in support of striking sanitation workers. The next day, he was murdered. In Redemption, Joseph Rosenbloom describes those thirty-one hours with rich detail and compelling analysis. Rosenbloom will speak at Novel in Memphis on April 23 and at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 26.
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In a new essay collection, Aram Goudsouzian and Charles W. McKinney Jr. consider race relations in the Bluff City
In An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee, a collection of scholarly essays, editors Aram Goudsouzian and Charles W. McKinney Jr. look at the Bluff City from emancipation through the turbulent 1960s and into the present. They will discuss An Unseen Light at two Memphis events: at the National Civil Rights Museum on April 17 and Novel on May 15.
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Lorrie Moore’s See What Can Be Done is a window into a lively mind
“Pick a thing up, study it, shake it, skip it across a still surface to see how much felt and lively life got baked into it,” writes Nashville author Lorrie Moore in her new collection, See What Can Be Done: Essays, Criticism, and Commentary.
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