God Is Change
In her essay collection about faith and science, World Without End, Martha Park identifies the uncanny overlaps between conflicting beliefs and gently prods at the heart of them. Park will discuss the book at Novel in Memphis on May 6.
Nonfiction
Honoring Grief, History, and Family
Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, a food memoir by former Kentucky Poet Laureate Crystal Wilkinson, offers a banquet of voices, memories, imagination, and archival photographs. Wilkinson will be the nonfiction workshop leader at this year’s Tremont Writers Conference in Townsend on October 22-26.
Disaster-Colored Glasses
Making sense of the land mines of life is the theme of Nashville author Mary Laura Philpott’s memoir in essays, Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives. Philpott will appear with Margaret Renkl at a fundraiser for The Porch at Juniper Green in Nashville on May 2.
Lost Causes
Confederate Sympathies analyzes the Civil War and its aftermath in the South by weaving histories of literature, politics, and sexuality. Its author, Andrew Donnelly, will be in conversation with Eva Payne at Novel in Memphis on April 28.
A Necessary Political Act
Opinions is a collection of Roxane Gay’s best nonfiction pieces from the last decade, in which she blends the personal and the political in her unflinching prose, offering us her unique take on a wide array of topics. Gay will be a keynote speaker at Bookstock, held at the Benjamin L. Hooks Library in Memphis on May 3.
Root, Root, Root for the Home Team
Keith B. Wood, a leading scholar of sports in Memphis, reconstructs the history of the Memphis Red Sox, a longstanding team in the Negro Leagues and a pillar of the city’s Black community. Wood will discuss The Memphis Red Sox: A Negro Leagues History at the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville on April 12.
