Celebrating a Good Cry
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.
Nonfiction
The Allure of the Absolutes
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.
Reckoning with M.L.K. on the Anniversary of His Assassination
Taylor Branch is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author of The King Years, a selection of excerpts from his trilogy on the civil-rights movement. Branch will deliver the keynote address of the MLK50 symposium at the University of Memphis Holiday Inn on April 3.
J. Edgar Hoover’s Man in Memphis
In A Spy in Canaan, Commercial Appeal reporter Marc Perrusquia vastly expands his 2010 front-page bombshell that identified famed civil-rights photographer Ernest Withers as a paid informant for the FBI. Perrusquia will discuss his book at Novel in Memphis on March 27, and at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 5.
A Mystic for Our Time
In Dangerous Mystic, Vanderbilt historian Joel Harrington explores the life of Meister Eckhart, a medieval theologian whose path to God has been embraced by New Age gurus and contemporary self-help writers. Harrington will discuss Dangerous Mystic at Parnassus Books in Nashville on March 20 at 6:30 p.m
Anything But Bland
Like many beautiful books these days, Amber Wilson’s For the Love of the South began as a website of the same name—”a place,” she writes, “where I shared my love for the food, characters, and culture that helped shape who I am.” She will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on March 13 and at Novel in Memphis on March 15.
