FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Blending poetry and prose, Joy Harjo’s second memoir, Poet Warrior, braids her story of becoming an accomplished poet and modern Native woman — always guided by her ancestors in the Muscogee (Creek) Nation — into the larger context of Native history.
In From Here to the Great Unknown, Lisa Marie Presley and her daughter Riley Keough offer up a memoir filled with details salacious, sorrowful, and deeply sentimental. The story belongs mostly to Presley, the only child of Elvis and Priscilla Presley, and she holds nothing back about her wild and singular life.
In George Masa: A Life Reimagined, Janet McCue and Paul Bonesteel delve into the story of a remarkable artist of the Great Smoky Mountains.
Aaron Robertson’s exacting, poetic The Black Utopians tracks the rise of Black nationalism, skeptical to its core, through a cadre of Detroit activists, knitting their creative and often militant ideas with memoir and his formerly incarcerated father’s letters, centering the question: “What does utopia look like in black?”
Between 2018 and 2020, Tennessee state officials killed seven men by electrocution or lethal injection, more than any other state in the country except Texas. In Death Row Welcomes You, journalist Steven Hale tells the stories of the condemned and the people who have come to know and love them. He also exposes the arbitrary nature of the death penalty and the hypocrisy of Tennessee governors. Hale will appear at the 2024 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, October 26-27.
Hanif Abdurraqib’s latest book, There’s Always This Year, is part memoir and part essay, but it’s all about basketball in Ohio during the author’s 1990s childhood. Abdurraqib will discuss There’s Always This Year at the Riverview Park Amphitheater in Chattanooga on October 30.
