Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

History Twisting Up Bright and Green

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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A Martyr’s Redemption

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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The Arc of Memphis History

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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Celebrating a Good Cry

Nikki Giovanni’s most recent collection centers on joy and pain

Celebrated poet, children’s author, essayist, and activist Nikki Giovanni will deliver the Wilma Dykeman Stokely Memorial Lecture at the Bijou Theatre in Knoxville on April 5.

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The Allure of the Absolutes

Alan Lightman revisits eternal questions in Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine

In a new collection of essays, Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine, Memphis native and acclaimed novelist Alan Lightman seeks to reconcile the material and the mystical.

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