Q&A

The Literary Legacy of Jimmy Carter, an essay anthology edited by Mark I. West and Frye Gaillard, surveys Carter’s large body of writing and considers what it reveals about the man from Plains, Georgia.

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: The historical figures at the center of Set the World on Fire by Keisha Blain are outside the halls of power: They are Black, they are women, they are poor or working-class, and they advocate ideas that fall outside the political mainstream. 

Chantha Nguon’s Slow Noodles chronicles her life growing up in Cambodia and her family’s flight to Vietnam to escape persecution under Lon Nol, before Year Zero and the terror of the Khmer Rouge. The book also describes the comfort of the delicious food made by Nguon’s mother, her sister, and later, by her. Nguon invites readers to understand Cambodian culture through both the pain of the past and the delicious flavors that fed hope for the future. Nguon, along with her daughter Clara Kim and co-author Kim Green, talked with Chapter 16 about how the memoir came to be. 

In Our Secret Society, Tanisha Ford plumbs the inner workings of the Civil Rights Movement through the complicated life of a dazzling socialite named Mollie Moon. Ford will discuss Our Secret Society at the University of Memphis on February 5.

White Property, Black Trespass by Nashville scholar and activist Andrew Krinks examines mass incarceration and racial hierarchies through a spiritual lens, with a perspective rooted in the belief that “there is life beyond the present order of exploitation, dispossession, and death.”