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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
