Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Latin Lessons

Bryce Ashby and Michael LaRosa bring historical and personal insight to the immigration debate

Immigration, Policy and the People of Latin America, a new book by attorney Bryce Ashby and historian Michael LaRosa, combines history, policy, and personal profiles to illuminate the diverse experiences of migrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, and Colombia.

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Do-It-Yourself Spirit

Joe Nolan’s Nowville chronicles Nashville’s contemporary art renaissance

In Nowville, Joe Nolan tells the story of Nashville’s contemporary art renaissance with a lively oral history featuring artists, gallerists, and curators.

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Straight on ‘til Morning

The River Will Be a Part of Us chronicles a remarkable youthful adventure

In the summer of 1981, a group of young people from the U.S. and Germany launched a homemade raft on the Missouri River near Kansas City, determined to float all the way to New Orleans. Nashvillian Justus Wayne Thomas documented the trip with his camera, and his striking photographs of the crew and the landscape they journeyed through are collected in The River Wil Be a Part of Us.

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Loss, Life, and Hope

Poet Christian Collier on craft, engaging an audience, and his debut collection, Greater Ghost

Chattanooga poet Christian Collier focuses on loss and grieving in his debut collection, Greater Ghost, while still infusing every poem with a pulsing, insistent life.

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Eyes in the Shadows

Tales of death and loss mark Grey Wolfe LaJoie’s unconventional story collection

Grey Wolfe LaJoie’s debut story collection, Little Ones, encompasses the psyche of social outcasts, night terrors, and the perceptive sufferers and witnesses of grief

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Coal Catastrophe

In Valley So Low, Jared Sullivan details the long fight for justice after a TVA environmental disaster

In his first book, Valley so Low, Jared Sullivan, a journalist who has written for The New Yorker, Time, and The Bitter Southerner, tells the story of a decade-long legal battle for Tennessee workers sickened and killed by the coal sludge from the 2008 Kingston Fossil Plant disaster. Sullivan will appear at Landmark Booksellers in Franklin on October 15; Williamson County Public Library in Franklin on October 16; East Tennessee History Center in Knoxville on October 17; ArtsBuild in Chattanooga on October 23; and the 2024 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, October 26-27.

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