A Publication of Humanities Tennessee

Sacred Harmony

July 6, 2012 In Circling Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality, editors Wendy Reed and Jennifer Horne weave the voices of seventeen very different women into a complex meditation on spiritual beliefs and practices. Together, the essays examine what it means for a woman to question, reject, seek, find, lose, keep, live, and grow into (and out of) her faith over the course of a lifetime. As Reed and Horne explain, “With this book we are hoping to inspire conversation and encourage vulnerability, to challenge memory, to up the volume.” Three Circling Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality contributors—Marilou Awaikta, Susan Cushman, and Beth Ann Fennelly—will read from their essays and sign copies of the collection at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on July 12 at 5 p.m.

Tasty Reading

July 5, 2012 In a culture filled with so-called food porn, it’s perhaps surprising that Nashville’s Alimentum: The Literature of Food is the country’s first literary journal dedicated exclusively to themes of table, kitchen, market, and sustenance. In its pages—and in a revamped website, launching today—editor Paulette Licitra invites readers to consider food as a savory (or sweet) organizing principle, which writers can apply to themes as wide as human experience itself.

Messing Around with Veracity

July 2, 2012 A hybrid of essay, prose poems, and art criticism, Syzygy, Beauty quietly dodges literary expectations and resists parsing. While the book chronicles a universal strain of story—the bumpy course of a complicated relationship, a love triangle—it does so through an entirely new, occasionally gorgeous script, in language that is both direct and oblique. “How to describe the indescribable might as well be the title of this blurb,” the writer Ander Monson, with whom Fleischmann has studied, writes. “[It] resists being fenced in.”

The Cost of Silence

June 25, 2012 “My childhood has been shadowed by two enormous fears: my father’s alcoholism and Rocky Flats,” writes Kristen Iversen, director of the M.F.A. program in creative writing at the University of Memphis. With honesty and dignity, Iversen explains how her increasingly troubled father and ineffectual mother created a fragile home life that depended on silence and secrets—an atmosphere not unlike that of the mismanaged and deadly dangerous nuclear-weapons facility at Rocky Flats, located near their suburban Colorado home. In Full Body Burden, Iversen illuminates the beauty of her childhood memories, but she does not flinch from uncovering the damage simultaneously inflicted upon her and her family, upon the land, and ultimately upon us all.

A Solitary Being

June 22, 2012 In Dust to Dust, Benjamin Busch recounts his life through a series of meditations on the physical world. This unorthodox memoir, which concerns itself quite literally with the stuff of a life, puts the reader in touch with the elemental struggle we all share. Busch will discuss and sign Dust to Dust at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on June 24 at 3 p.m., and at Parnassus Books in Nashville on July 11 at 6:30 p.m.

Who Spoke for the Negro?

May 23, 2012 In 2008, the Robert Penn Warren Center at Vanderbilt University held a civil-rights symposium for scholars and for those who participated in the movement. The event commemorated both the fortieth anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and the unveiling of a new, digitized collection of interviews with civil-rights leaders conducted by Warren during the 1960s. The Warren Center has now launched an updated version of the site, and Chapter 16 recently spoke with Mona Frederick, executive director of the center, about the collection and the opportunities for research it provides.

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