Found after Wilma Dykeman’s death in 2006, Family of Earth details the writer and civil-rights activist’s childhood in the mountains around Asheville, North Carolina. This poignant memoir extends the reach of Dykeman’s renowned writing about southern Appalachian places and people.
Whether she’s writing about her tough, spirited characters or her own difficult life, Dorothy Allison seems determined to defy all narrow categories, seeking instead to express the full complexity of human experience. Allison, who serves as the 2016 Acuff Chair at the Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts at Austin Peay State University, will speak on October 27 at 8 p.m. in Clement Auditorium on the APSU campus. The event is free and open to the public.
In Just Around Midnight, Jack Hamilton describes how great artists such as Sam Cooke, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Aretha Franklin, and the Rolling Stones crossed the race line in their music, even as the culture was separating “rock” and “soul” into separate genres. The Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis will host a conversation and book signing with Hamilton on October 27 at 7 p.m.
Pushing past the pressure to be perfect daughters, the writers in Good Girls Marry Doctors provide a multifaceted look at women who are moving beyond and even reconstructing cultural and familial expectations. Editor Piyali Bhattacharya will discuss Good Girls Marry Doctors at Parnassus Books in Nashville on October 25 at 6:30 p.m.
Beth Macy’s Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother’s Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South tells the tale of young African-American boys taken from their sharecropper family in Virginia and made into a circus sideshow that toured the world. Macy will appear at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 14-16. Festival events are free and open to the public.
Through a close cultural study conducted in Louisiana, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild sought to explain the deep-seated fears that helped create the current political divide. She will discuss the resulting book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 14-16.
