Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Six Haiku

Book Excerpt: Old Roads

Old Roads is a collection of haiku and photographs by East Tennessee writer Brett Taylor. The photographs were taken in an array of Tennessee locations, including Wartburg, Petros, Greenback, Pall Mall, Norris, Cades Cove, and south Knoxville. Taylor has written for The South Carolina Review, Skeptical Inquirer, Fortean Times, FilmfaxGreen Mountains Review, Folio, Ampersand, Redivider, Big Muddy and San Pedro River Review.  

Read more

The Girl Their Hymns Forgot

A debut poetry collection grapples with the vulnerability of children in a violent world

In her debut collection, Hive, Nashville poet Christina Stoddard writes in the voice of a teenage Mormon girl about violence and its lifelong effects. Stoddard will read from her work at Scarritt Bennett Center in Nashville on December 16.

Read more

“A View That Wasn’t There Before”

Book Excerpt: A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being

Jeff Hardin is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Small Revolution, No Other Kind of World, and A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being. His work has been honored with the Nicholas Roerich Prize, the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, and the X. J. Kennedy Prize. Hardin will read from his work at Scarritt Bennett Center in Nashville on November 18.

Read more

“Ascension”

Book Excerpt: Moon Jar

Didi Jackson’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Kenyon Review, Best American Poetry, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day. She currently teaches creative writing at Vanderbilt University. 

Read more

“The holiday / of catastrophe …”

Book Excerpt: Our Cancers

Dan O’Brien’s Our Cancers chronicles the year and a half during which both he and his wife, actor and writer Jessica St. Clair, were treated for cancer. O’Brien is the author of three previous poetry collections and the recipient of many playwriting honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and two PEN America Awards. His essay collection A Story That Happens: On Playwriting, Childhood, & Other Traumas was published in 2021. He has served on the faculty of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference for more than a decade.

Read more

Gatherers at Time’s End

Excerpt: Specter Mountain

From the Chapter 16 archive: Specter Mountain is a book-length poetry collaboration between Jesse Graves and William Wright that imagines the spiritual and ecological life of an embattled landscape. The collection fuses two striking poetic visions into a new perspective on nature and the inevitable imprint of human interaction with wilderness.

Read more
TAKE THE SHORT READER SURVEY! CHAPTER 16 SURVEYOR SURVEYING