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.
Confederate Sympathies analyzes the Civil War and its aftermath in the South by weaving histories of literature, politics, and sexuality. Its author, Andrew Donnelly, will be in conversation with Eva Payne at Novel in Memphis on April 28.
Keith B. Wood, a leading scholar of sports in Memphis, reconstructs the history of the Memphis Red Sox, a longstanding team in the Negro Leagues and a pillar of the city’s Black community. Wood will discuss The Memphis Red Sox: A Negro Leagues History at the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville on April 12.
The Wounds Are the Witness by Yolanda Pierce, dean of Vanderbilt Divinity School, serves as devotional reading, a summons to self-care, and encouragement for everyday action and outspokenness.
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Shauna LaVoy Reynolds’ debut picture book, Poetree, is a gentle ode to spring and friendship.
Presidents Richard Nixon, Harry Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, along with Senator Robert F. Kennedy, all played roles in the tale Clay Risen tells in Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. Risen, a Nashville native and editor for The New York Times, takes a fresh look at the dark side of the 1950s, when Senator Joseph McCarthy ruined careers and lives with accusations of communism.
