Chapter 16
A Publication of Humanities Tennessee

Do-It-Yourself Spirit

In Nowville, Joe Nolan tells the story of Nashville’s contemporary art renaissance with a lively oral history featuring artists, gallerists, and curators.

Do-It-Yourself Spirit

Straight on ‘til Morning

In the summer of 1981, a group of young people from the U.S. and Germany launched a homemade raft on the Missouri River near Kansas City, determined to float all the way to New Orleans. Nashvillian Justus Wayne Thomas documented the trip with his camera, and his striking photographs of the crew and the landscape they journeyed through are collected in The River Wil Be a Part of Us.

Straight on ‘til Morning

A Light on in the Mica Windows

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.

A Singular Life

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.

Inspired by Nature

In George Masa: A Life Reimagined, Janet McCue and Paul Bonesteel delve into the story of a remarkable artist of the Great Smoky Mountains.

American Dreams

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?”

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