A Publication of Humanities Tennessee

The Myth and the Man

With the Pulitzer Prize-winning King: A Life, Jonathan Eig has written the definitive biography of Martin Luther King Jr. for this generation. Eig will discuss King: A Life at the 2025 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, October 18-19.

Black Socrates

Brian Kwoba’s Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism examines the life and legacy of an activist, intellectual, and journalist who challenged the status quo on race, politics, capitalism, and romantic relationships.

Big Men on Campus

In How College Presidents Succeed, Michael Nelson extracts wisdom from three generations of a family known as “Virginia’s academic dynasty.”

Discovering the Soil All Over Again

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: When he died in January 2022, historian John Rice Irwin was described as the “guardian of Appalachia’s past.” In a 2008 interview, he talked with poet Jesse Graves about his family and his life’s work.

Red Horizons

In an ever-tilting time of political unrest, ecoclimate crises, and unstable concepts of the future, poet Larry D. Thacker envisions a different world in his latest poetry collection, New Red Words.

Honoring Grief, History, and Family

Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, a food memoir by former Kentucky Poet Laureate Crystal Wilkinson, offers a banquet of voices, memories, imagination, and archival photographs. Wilkinson will be the nonfiction workshop leader at this year’s Tremont Writers Conference in Townsend on October 22-26.

Visit the Q&A archives chronologically below or search for an article

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