Chapter 16

3 days ago | chapter16.org | Maria Browning

Two soldiers, one for the Union and one for the Confederacy, die in each other’s tender embrace, with what looks like a kiss. This scene occurs in The Birth of a Nation, a notorious 1915 film by D.W. Griffith that romanticizes the Lost Cause of the South in the Civil War. In Confederate Sympathies, a wide-ranging and impressive literary history, Andrew Donnelly interprets novels, memoirs, histories, and movie scenes such as this one.

4 days ago | chapter16.org | Maria Browning

Roxane Gay has a lot of opinions. Fortunately for us, she is not afraid to share them. One of our nation’s most eloquent and daring public intellectuals, a writer, editor, professor, and cultural commentator, she has grappled with the larger issues facing society — racism, the rolling back of civil rights, women’s reproductive freedom — as well as more individual topics like fatness, bisexuality, and Blackness.

1 week ago | chapter16.org | Erica Wright |Sean Kinch |Lee Conell |Ed Tarkington

In her new story collection Hellions, Julia Elliott embraces the grotesque, playing with a rich literary tradition and molding it into something wholly her own. These tales teem with supernatural creatures — demons, hags, changelings, and swamp apes — but it’s the humans who are most compelling. Hellions opens with “Bride” in which the nun Wilda flagellates and starves herself to purge her body of sin, specifically lust.

1 week ago | chapter16.org | Maria Browning

In a 2024 Q&A with The Guardian, Lorrie Moore makes two bold claims, the first regarding her appreciation for Miranda July’s All Fours: “Well, that’s what fiction is for — flawed but interesting women.” She goes on to assert: “I would never read literature for comfort. I would read literature for transport and for meeting a few people I would never want to meet in real life.”Moore, the 2025 guest author in Chattanooga State’s Writers@Work program, has the bona fides to make such claims.

2 weeks ago | chapter16.org | Maria Browning

The storied American Dream includes an idyllic house with a white picket fence, a straight couple with 2.5 children, perhaps a dog frolicking in the sprinkler in the front yard. It does not usually feature a cheating husband who either comes home smelling of other women’s perfume or arrives with a six-pack of beer he works through before dinner — a stimulant that turns him mean and sometimes violent. The latter is Gloria Joyce’s life in Ashley N.