Anjali Enjeti considers her identity in an evolving region in Southbound
In the final pages of Southbound, Anjali Enjeti’s collection of essays on identity, race, and Southern politics, the author poses one simple but thorny question that looms like a ghost over much of the work: “Who am I?”
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Alexander Chee illuminates the writing life in How To Write An Autobiographical Novel
In his powerful essay collection, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, Alexander Chee charts his own history as a writer and invites readers into a close engagement with the process of writing a novel from personal materials. Chee will appear at a virtual event hosted by Vanderbilt University on November 12.
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Nell Irvin Painter talks with Chapter 16 about The History of White People, the relationship between sex and beauty, and the necessity of the Black Lives Matter movement
Prior to her 2015 lecture at Rhodes College, historian Nell Irvin Painter talked with Chapter 16 about how the concept of race entered human consciousness, why notions of beauty are so inextricably linked to sex, and how contemporary readers should accommodate for historical wrong-headedness.
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Amy Greenberg’s new biography calls Sarah Polk the ‘First Lady who was a lady first’
Amy S. Greenberg, professor of history and women’s studies at Penn State University, will talk about Lady First, her biography of Sarah Childress Polk, at the East Tennessee History Center in Knoxville on January 29.
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For more than three decades, Patricia McKissack has been writing children’s books that bring to life the stories, and the truth, of her ancestors
As she was coming of age in Nashville in the 1950s, there were many places award-winning children’s author Patricia McKissack was not allowed to go. She remembers hotels and restaurants that forbade African Americans entry, and movie theaters with a separate doorway in the alley for black patrons. The farthest reaches of the Grand Ole Opry’s balcony, known as the buzzard’s roost, was the only seating open to African Americans, McKissack recalls. She never partook: “My grandfather said that watermelons would bloom in January if any of his children went down there. ‘We don’t sit in no buzzard’s roost,’ he said. ‘We’re human beings, not buzzards.'”
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In The Secret Token, Andrew Lawler excavates the many theories surrounding the vanished colony of Roanoke
In The Secret Token, Andrew Lawler investigates the fate of the vanished colony of Roanoke Island, the first English settlement on North America. Andrew Lawler will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 18 and at the East Tennessee History Center in Knoxville on June 19.
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