FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: An author of both groundbreaking criticism and acclaimed poetry, Alicia Ostriker has devoted much of her work to a feminist transformation of literary and cultural tradition. Whether arguing for recognition of women’s poetry as a genre in its own right or recasting the stories of the Bible from a feminist perspective, Ostriker is a radical with a deep respect for her roots.
In Vaulting Ambition, Michael Nelson explains the flawed decisions that led to one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s greatest missteps: his 1937 plan to add new justices to the Supreme Court. Nelson will appear in conversation with Joe Birch at Novel in Memphis on March 5.
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Alice Faye Duncan’s award-winning 2018 picture book, Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop, offers children an account of the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
In Title IX, Pat Summitt, and Tennessee’s Trailblazers, historian Mary Ellen Pethel measures the impact of 50 years of Title IX legislation on Tennessee women’s athletics in higher education. Pethel will discuss the book at the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville on March 11.
During the past year, Knoxville writer Charles Dodd White has seen three books published — a feat that would be a high point for any writer’s career. In a recent email exchange with Chapter 16, he discusses how this body of work came to be and contemplates the future of his writing life.
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: In the bestselling Bloodlands, which has been critically acclaimed and widely translated, Timothy Snyder argues that the systematic killings in the Nazi death camps were part of the same arc of violence as the mass starving inflicted on Ukraine by the Soviets in the 1930s and the extra-legal killings perpetrated by Germans and Russians alike during their occupation of Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic States.
