May 4, 2016 With thirteen novels and four short-story collections to her credit, Lee Smith is virtually synonymous with Appalachian fiction. In her new memoir-in-essays, Dimestore, she takes readers with her on a tour of the places, people, and experiences that have shaped her life and her writing. Smith will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 11, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.
April 28, 2016 Jeff Daniel Marion: Poet on the Holston celebrates the life and work of Appalachian poet Jeff Daniel Marion. Edited by Jesse Graves, Thomas Alan Holmes, and Ernest Lee, the anthology contains seventeen essays—including an autobiographical essay by Marion himself—an interview with the poet, and a detailed timeline of his life.
April 27, 2016 Shirletta Kinchen’s Black Power in the Bluff City examines the way black youth in Memphis played a pivotal role in creating societal change, both before and after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Hotel in 1968. In the end, the struggle for equality became a children’s crusade, with high-school and college students leading the way.
April 26, 2016 Mathews County, Virginia, has a long tradition of supplying seafaring men to the Merchant Marine. In The Mathews Men, Seven Brothers and the War Against Hitler’s U-Boats, William Geroux writes of the exceptional service and sacrifice during World War II of the seamen from Mathews County. He will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville May 3, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.
April 25, 2016 In American Artists Against War, Rhodes College professor David McCarthy serves up a history of protest with artists at its center.
April 21, 2016 Sonja Livingston’s second essay collection, Ladies Night at the Dreamland, is a kind of literary search-and-rescue effort. In twenty-one delicately crafted pieces, she brings forth a remarkable group of little-known women and girls from the past, imagining her way into their lives with lyrical intensity. Livingston will discuss the book at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on April 26, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.
