Chapter 16

To address the decline of book coverage in newspapers throughout Tennessee, Humanities Tennessee launched Chapter 16 in 2009. This platform aims to deliver thorough updates on literary happenings and news within the state. Every weekday, Chapter 16 shares new articles highlighting author events taking place across Tennessee and showcasing the latest book releases from local authors.

Local

English

Online/Digital

Outlet metrics

Domain Authority

Ranking

Global

#1660533

United States

#525391

Science and Education/Libraries and Museums

#2039

Traffic sources

Monthly visitors

Articles

“Who Do You Think You Are?”

3 weeks ago | chapter16.org | Maria Browning

Long before Martha S. Jones wrote The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir, she was a young woman worried about her birth certificate. At 19, Jones wanted to study abroad. She’d need a passport, of course, and that meant digging her birth certificate out of the family’s fireproof strongbox tucked in a dark corner of her mom’s bedroom. Finding it, she saw a word that confounded what she knew about herself. That word was “white.”“My heart raced as I frantically scanned the paper,” Jones writes.
A Parable of Young Womanhood

3 weeks ago | chapter16.org | Maria Browning

Like a Southern summer, Girls with Long Shadows may appear at first glance to be a sweet and easy tale. At a distance, the novel’s main characters — the 19-year-old identical Binderup triplets — resemble archetypal Southern beauties: tall and thin, blonde and blue-eyed. They tend to their grandmother’s golf course in their bikinis, say “yes ma’am” and “no sir,” and don’t take the Lord’s name in vain.
Honey and a Ham Sandwich

3 weeks ago | chapter16.org | Margaret Renkl

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This essay originally appeared on November 17, 2017. ***If I’m ever in the unfortunate position of having to choose my last meal, I will choose a ham sandwich on lightly-toasted Pepperidge Farm bread and a cup of tea with milk and sugar. This is what I ate for lunch with my grandmother most afternoons when I was in grammar school. I went to St. Nicholas in the Heights section of Jersey City.
In the Drink

1 month ago | chapter16.org | Maria Browning

Hear the name William Faulkner and you think of his work. Short stories like “Barn Burning” or long ones like “The Bear,” such novels as The Sound and the Fury or Absalom, Absalom! The tangled prose, those thorny truths. And his greatest creation, a small world as real to us as the dirt under our feet, the mythical Yoknapatawpha County. Yet the work wasn’t enough. It never is. When we’re fascinated by the art, we must find out all we can of the artist.
A Life in Bookmarks

1 month ago | chapter16.org | Maria Browning

I told a friend about an argument we had in the library while designing some bookmarks. One staff member kept wanting to add information. “We have more information than bookmark,” a frustrated colleague said. “Then make the bookmark bigger,” snapped the annoyed staff member. My friend was more puzzled than amused as I described a proposed bookmark larger than any book. “Who uses bookmarks anymore?” she asked.
A Timely Reckoning

1 month ago | chapter16.org | Maria Browning

“Tennessee” is derived from the Cherokee noun Ta-Nas-Ce, “river with a big bend,” which could allude to scores of streams and meanders in the state’s watershed but likely refers to a bend and village along the Little Tennessee River in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. David Narrett’s magisterial, detailed The Cherokees: In War and at Peace, 1670-1840 maps the Indigenous nation’s outsized influence on the history of the republic that dispossessed them of so much land and esteem.
Busy Dreams

1 month ago | chapter16.org | Maria Browning

A mother and father find themselves at odds over how to handle their troubled adult son, a relapsed alcoholic they believe may have killed someone during a blackout. A history professor nearing retirement recalls his childhood religiousness and his break with the Catholic Church before visiting an old friend with a terrible secret. A woman shelters at home with her husband during Covid while fearing for the life of the lover separated from her by the pandemic.
Missing Cat

1 month ago | chapter16.org | Maria Browning

One of the saddest times of my life was the month Tummywumps, my ginger tabby, went missing. I’d left a window open overnight, and while I dozed, she sliced a hole in the screen and stole away like a jewel thief. She was gone … and I was heartbroken. Tummywumps had always seemed happy, or at least indifferent. Like abstract art, the emotional state of a cat is subject to interpretation. Whatever my pet felt about our relationship, she left me that night.
“In-Between”

1 month ago | chapter16.org | Maria Browning

Too big to simply carry to bed. Too small to wake. That nasty in-betweenof adolescence whereeven your parents don’t knowhow to treat you anymore. So they let you liehalf-awake in theback seat of the car,convinced you’llinstinctively rise andfollow them insidein a few minutes. When you don’t,they pretend notto notice, call youcute in yourabsence, as if youwere still thatthree-year-old toddlertripping through their house —not the strangerasleepin the back seat of the car.
To Stand Close and Feel Less Alone

1 month ago | chapter16.org | Maria Browning

In Run for the Hills, Sewanee author Kevin Wilson takes readers on an unconventional road trip with four siblings eager to ask some hard questions of their long-lost father. Thirty-two-year-old Madeline “Mad” Hill is stunned when Rueben “Rube” Hill shows up at the organic farm she runs with her mother and announces he is her half-brother.