“Mending and Transforming” at the 2022 Southern Festival of Books
Serenity Gerbman, Director of Literature and Language Programs at Humanities Tennessee.
After two years online during the pandemic, Humanities Tennessee welcomes back authors and audiences for an in-person Southern Festival of Books October 14-16.
We are back.
But we are not the same.
And we know you’re not either.
We hope you will join us at the Southern Festival of Books to once again be part of a community that engages with books and ideas. Each year, we are proud to
partner with the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities on a themed track at the Festival. This year’s theme is “Mending and Transforming,” perhaps the most appropriate and timely ever. What do we want to keep, repair, and treasure? And what must we leave behind or make entirely new?
The series of sessions at the Festival will explore this idea through multiple genres. They include:
Author Ada Calhoun, discussing art and familial relationships in her memoir, Also A Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me.
The arc of social justice is explored through historic and very contemporary stories with authors Thomas E. Ricks (Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968), Justin Jones (The People’s Plaza: Sixty-Two Days of Nonviolent Resistance), and Chris Joyner (The Three Death Sentences of Clarence Henderson: A Battle for Racial Justice at the Dawn of the Civil Rights Era).
David Haskell explores sound and nature in his groundbreaking book, Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction.
Podcast host (Terrible, Thanks for Asking) and author Nora McInerny writes humorous essays (“Bad Vibes Only”) that share her journey of grief and beginning her life over.
Margaret Renkl, New York Times opinion columnist, will be in conversation with two authors, Silas House (Lark Ascending) and Mary Laura Philpott (Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives).
We will explore gay and trans rights with Lydia Conklin (Rainbow Rainbow: Stories), Z. Zane McNeill (Y’all Means All: The Emerging Voices Queering Appalachia), and Casey Parks (Diary of a Misfit: A Memoir and a Mystery), and racial justice and reckoning with Margaret Burnham (By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners) and Imani Perry (South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon Line to Understand the Soul of a Nation).
Kristen Green (The Devil’s Half-Acre: The Untold Story of How One Woman Liberated the South’s Most Notorious Slave Jail) and Ben Raines (The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning) demonstrate how history is being properly re-written through recent discoveries.
Gal Beckerman will discuss his groundbreaking exploration of how small ideas germinate and grow into world-changing concepts with his book, The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas.
Through all of these sessions, we will be hearing, learning, and sharing our stories of the past few years and the opportunities that lie before us. Each author will sign books following the session, and all books will be sold onsite courtesy of Parnassus Books.
We hope you will join us for the Festival, which is entirely free. More information is available on our website at www.humtn.org and on the free app, which allows you to customize your schedule for the weekend. In addition to 175 authors, we have performance stages for music and the performing arts, a children’s activity zone, multiple food trucks, and a beer garden courtesy of Yazoo and Bearded Iris. Come browse our vendor booths and the Parnassus book sales tent, and be part of a community that is mending and transforming with you.
Serenity Gerbman has served as Director of Literature and Language Programs at Humanities Tennessee since 2001. She has been a judge for the National Endowment for the Arts Big Reads program, and is a past board member and Athena Award nominee for the Women’s National Book Association. She lives with her daughter in Murfreesboro.