Q&A

Dr. Enkeshi El-Amin is a researcher, cultural worker, and lecturer at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she earned a Ph.D. in sociology. As co-host of the Black in Appalachia podcast and the founder of The Bottom, a non-profit community space in Knoxville, she’s working to reclaim space for Black voices and communities.

In Rachel Louise Martin’s Hot, Hot Chicken, the story of a beloved Nashville dish is inextricable from the history of redlining and misguided urban renewal initiatives that undermined the city’s Black communities for generations. Martin will appear at a virtual event hosted by The Bookshop in Nashville on April 5.

Artists of all kinds who long for more time and energy to devote to creative pursuits will find much to inspire them in Kickstart Creativity: 50 Prompted Cards to Spark Inspiration, the latest project from Nashville writer and educator Bonnie Smith Whitehouse. She will appear at a virtual event hosted by Parnassus books in Nashville on February 10.

Colin Dayan’s Animal Quintet, as the title suggests, is an ensemble of short compositions, each with an animal motif. The collection is a potent mix of memoir and meditation, tender dreams and nightmares.

The ideal of the public defender evolved over the course of 20th-century America, as Sara Mayeux describes in Free Justice. Mayeux, who has a Ph.D. in history and a law degree from Stanford University, is a law professor at Vanderbilt University.