Vanderbilt University Press
TN Writers/TN Stories: Rachel Martin
TN State Museum 1000 Rosa L Parks Blvd, Nashville, TN, United StatesAustralia advertise that they fry their chicken “Nashville-style.” Thousands of people attend the Music City Hot Chicken Festival each year. The James Beard Foundation has given Prince’s Chicken Shack an American Classic Award for inventing the dish. But for almost seventy years, hot chicken was made and sold primarily in Nashville’s Black neighborhoods—and the story…
TN Writers | TN Stories: Dr. Mark Cheathem
Tennessee State Museum, 1000 Rosa L Parks Blvd, Nashville, TN 37208, USAThe presidential election of 1844 had it all: an unpopular incumbent forced out of the race, a perennial presidential loser, a candidate whose career appeared to be on life support, a long-shot whose political ideology had been transformed by religious conversion, even a political assassination. Out of this collection of contenders emerged James K. Polk,…
TN Writers | TN Stories: Ciona Rouse
Tennessee State Museum, 1000 Rosa L Parks Blvd, Nashville, TN 37208, USAPoet, editor, and educator Ciona Rouse is the author of Vantablack, the first chapbook of Third Man Books (2017). Her poetry has appeared in the journals Oxford American, Wildness, Booth, The Account, Still, Talking River, Gabby Journal, Matter: a journal of political poetry and commentary and other publications. She has been featured on NPR Music and has work selected by Ada Limón for the podcast The Slowdown.
TN Writers | TN Stories: Aime Alley Card
Tennessee State Museum, 1000 Rosa L Parks Blvd, Nashville, TN 37208, USAThe Tigerbelles tells the epic story of the 1960 Tennessee State University all-Black women's track team, which found Olympic glory at the 1960 games in Rome. The author tells a story of desire, success and failure--of beating the odds--against the backdrop of a changing America, but tells it in an intimate way. Readers will come to…
TN Writers | TN Stories: Michael T. Bertrand in conversation with Sheri Bartlett Browne, Ph.D.
Tennessee State Museum, 1000 Rosa L Parks Blvd, Nashville, TN 37208, USASouthern History Remixed: On Rock ‘n’ Roll and the Dilemma of Race is a book about popular music. But it also is a book about southern history. The two are not mutually exclusive. Ultimately, it is an exploration which demonstrates that what occurs in the musical realm does affect and reflect what happens in the historical…
TN Writers | TN Stories: Jared Sullivan at the Southern Festival of Books
Tennessee State Museum, 1000 Rosa L Parks Blvd, Nashville, TN 37208, USAFor more than 50 years, a power plant in the small town of Kingston, Tennessee, burned fourteen thousand tons of coal a day, gradually creating a mountain of ashen waste 60 feet high and covering 84 acres, contained only by an earthen embankment. In 2008, just before Christmas, that embankment broke, unleashing a lethal wave of…
TN Writers | TN Stories with Keith Wood
Tennessee State Museum, 1000 Rosa L Parks Blvd, Nashville, TN 37208, USAThe Memphis Red Sox: A Negro Leagues History examines Memphis’s symbolic meaning and value as a Negro leagues baseball city during Jim Crow. It locates the main intersections between black professional baseball and the South in the four decades that spanned the modern Negro leagues era and analyzes the racial dynamics in the city through the…
TN Writers | TN Stories with John P. Williams
Tennessee State Museum, 1000 Rosa L Parks Blvd, Nashville, TN 37208, USAThe name Montgomery Bell is well known to residents of Davidson County and the greater middle Tennessee region. Montgomery Bell State Park is located in Dickson County, forty minutes west of Nashville, and Nashville is home to Montgomery Bell Academy. Both were named for the successful 19th century industrialist and iron master, who moved to…
[POSTPONED] TN Writers | TN Stories with Charlie Peacock
Tennessee State Museum, 1000 Rosa L Parks Blvd, Nashville, TN 37208, USAIn this artful memoir, Roots and Rhythm, Grammy Award–winning music producer Charlie Peacock flexes his literary chops and gives readers the gritty backstage stories they crave: biographical anecdotes, geeky trivia, and how the hits were written and recorded (from jazz to rock and pop). Threaded throughout is Peacock’s unique ancestral and spiritual story—the roots. Like…