October 10, 2014 The Southern Festival of Books is big, varied, and one of the most inclusive cultural events around. Chapter 16’s Maria Browning considers the special pleasure of the festival’s collective spirit. The twenty-sixth annual Southern Festival of Books will take place in Nashville October 10-12, 2014, at Legislative Plaza and the Nashville Public Library. All festival events are free and open to the public.
October 1, 2014 Patricia Lockwood’s Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals is at times gut-punch funny, and it is wildly inventive throughout, but the book’s center of gravity is “Rape Joke,” the poem that went viral last year. Lockwood will appear at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 10-12, 2014. All festival events are free and open to the public.
September 26, 2014 Amy Billone is a poet and a scholar who has published widely in both creative and academic journals. Her poetry collection, The Light Changes, was named a best book of the year in 2013 by Kirkus Reviews and won the 2014 IndieReader Discovery Award in Poetry. Billone, an Associate Professor of English at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, will give a free public reading at the University of Tennessee’s Hodges Library on September 29, 2014, at 7 p.m.
September 19, 2014 The poems in TJ Jarrett’s stunning second collection, Zion, are shaped by the desire to summon mercy and forgiveness in the face of terrible wrong, and they celebrate, without a trace of sentimentality, the sustaining power of love. TJ Jarrett will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on September 26, 2014, at 6:30 p.m. and again at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 10-12, 2014.
September 19, 2014 Let’s just go ahead and call 2014 Khaled Mattawa’s year: in January he was appointed chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and now he has been named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. What this most recent honor means in lay terms: Mattawa has just won a $625,000 “genius” grant.
August 22, 2014 Jeff Hardin is the author of two collections of poetry: Fall Sanctuary, recipient of the Nicholas Roerich Prize, and Notes for a Praise Book. His third collection, Restoring the Narrative, received the Donald Justice Poetry Prize and will be published in 2015. He is professor of English at Columbia State Community College in Columbia, Tennessee. Hardin will give a free public reading at the Scarritt-Bennett Center in Nashville on August 28, 2014, at 6 p.m.
