Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

To Wonder, to Marvel, to Be Astonished

Pick a card — or two, or three — for instant inspiration

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.

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Violence, love, and animals

Colin Dayan discusses the obsessions that shape her work

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.

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Courting Justice

Vanderbilt law scholar Sara Mayeux chronicles the role of the public defender in American history

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.

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Why Merle Haggard Deserves a Nobel Prize

Peter Guralnick discusses his latest book, Looking to Get Lost

In a wide-ranging interview with Chapter 16, music journalist and biographer Peter Guralnick recalls some of his most famous subjects, from Solomon Burke to Johnny Cash, and explains why the longest piece in his new collection of profiles, Looking to Get Lost, “was the story I felt I had to write.”

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Future Farms

A science writer traveled to the fields and labs where agriculture is changing

Nashville-based science writer Amanda Little talks with Chapter 16 about The Fate of Food, the result of five years of research in 15 countries. A paperback edition of the book has just been released.

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An Unbroken Thread

Poet Jesse Graves discusses his fourth collection, Merciful Days

In haunting lyric poems and traditional narratives, Jesse Graves’ Merciful Days shows us the ‘ghost-lives’ that shaped the boy learning the rough language of cows and that imprint the returning adult who walks the fence line now without his father. Graves talks with Chapter 16 about the experiences and influences that inform his work.

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