October 18, 2011 Author Patricia McKissack and illustrators Leo and Diane Dillon have created a children’s picture book about slavery that is neither maudlin nor depressing. Instead it is brave, heart-rending, visually breathtaking, truly magical, and filled with a deep wisdom that will resonate with anyone who has wrestled with pain and grief. Never Forgotten is an exquisitely hopeful, healing gift.
October 6, 2011 With a new show called Fragments: Poets and Artists of the South and Southwest, Memphis’s Harrington Brown Gallery hosts an innovative exploration of the ancient tradition of ekphrasis—a literary description or consideration of a work of art. The show opens on October 7 at 6 p.m. and runs through November 1.
October 6, 2011 Bill Brown has written four poetry collections, three chapbooks, and a textbook. The recipient of many awards and fellowships, Brown lives in the hills of Robertson County with his wife, Suzanne, and a tribe of cats. He wrote “The Faraway Nearby” for an exhibition called Fragments: Poets and Artists of the South and Southwest at the Harrington Brown Gallery in Memphis. Brown’s poem is a response to a photograph of the work of Carolyn Hinske, a fiber artist based in Taos, New Mexico. Read more about Fragments here.
October 3, 2011 “Razor Hair Girls,” a poem by Gallatin native Elizabeth McClellan, is one of five finalists for the 2011 Naked Girls Reading Literary Honors. The winner will be announced in Chicago on November 18 after a live, on-stage reading of the finalists by the Naked Girls, a group of “beautiful ladies who love to read…naked,” according to their website.
September 22, 2011 Liz Garrigan’s Dear John letter to Amazon in today’s edition of Chapter 16 is an unvarnished call for book lovers to put their money where their mouths are and support their local bookstores instead of buying books online. Garrigan argues that Amazon’s refusal to collect the state and local sales taxes that other bricks-and-mortar stores collect–taxes that support local schools, police and fire departments, and other civic necessities–amounts to a “powerful incentive for customers to let their fingers do the clicking.”
September 19, 2011 Terrance Hayes’s fourth collection of poems, Lighthead, won the National Book Award in poetry this year—a prize which is only the most recent iteration of an award-winning literary career. Hayes recently answered questions from Chapter 16 via email prior to his appearances at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville on September 21 and at Vanderbilt University in Nashville on September 23.
