Salon@615 Celebrates 10 Years
Salon@615, a collaboration of Nashville Public Library, Nashville Public Library Foundation, Parnassus Books, Humanities Tennessee, and BookPage magazine, celebrates 10 years of nurturing the literary life of Nashville. Since 2011, the partnership has featured authors of local, regional, and national prominence, including Melinda Gates, Kwame Alexander, Cyntoia Brown, Gloria Steinem, Rick Bragg, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jon Meacham, Nashville’s own Ann Patchett, and many others.
When Nashville’s two largest bookstores closed, Nashville Public Library and Humanities Tennessee joined forces to fill the void, developing a calendar of rich, in-person author talks and book signings. Joined by Parnassus Books, which opened in November 2011, and then BookPage, Salon@615 flourished, attracting authors of diverse genres and reaching audiences across Nashville with events held at the Main Branch of Nashville Public Library and larger venues including the Tennessee Performing Arts Center.
From Tim Henderson, Executive Director of Humanities Tennessee, “While Salon@615 was conceived to help ensure access to literary arts programming throughout the year, it has also come to demonstrate how well a fully collaborative public program can work. The series manages to find the intersection of the missions and the audiences of all the program’s partners. This has strengthened those partnerships across other programs, including the Southern Festival of Books. Our hope is that we will continue to build on those strengths to provide excellent literary programs for even more Tennesseans in the coming years.”
Despite the pandemic, Salon@615 has continued to offer a robust online calendar of author events, plus has made its video archive available to the public.