Best of Nashville Arts & Entertainment

BEST STAGE DIRECTOR: RENÉ COPELAND

BEST GENRE-EXPLODING LOCAL WRITER: MINTON SPARKS

In a marvelous pastiche of poetry, prose, interview and documentary, Minton Sparks’ first book, Desperate Ransom: Setting Her Family Free, explores the disconnect between actual family history and the way we choose to remember it. Long a phenomenon on the spoken word/performance artist scene, Sparks pulled off a seemingly impossible task this year: transferring her stage show to the page. Anyone who has seen Sparks perform knows how quickly and authentically she can turn from hilarity to heartbreak and back again. Garbed in her grandmother’s dress and accompanied by some of Nashville’s finest musicians, she recounts and acts out her Southern family’s dramas. But Desperate Ransom goes further. Its collage structure indicates a sophisticated artist wrestling with the twin themes of identity and history. As Sparks writes, “Suddenly who I am and what I want are two very different things.” Desperate Ransom enacts that struggle. —PABLO TANGUAY

BEST MISTRESS OF THE COZY: MARY SAUMS

By day, Mary Saums is a mild-mannered postal carrier. By night, she’s firing AK-47’s and dodging bad guys. Well, her alter egos are, anyway. Saums has written some of the funniest cozy mysteries in the genre. Her first series, featuring Willi Taft (Midnight Hour, The Valley of the Jewels and When the Last Magnolia Weeps) showed off Saums’ talent for writing sharp, witty dialogue and knack for placing realistic characters in precarious positions. The first book in her new series, Thistle and Twigg, features two widows in their 60s who know how to make a cup of tea and chase villains. As Saums says, “It’s something like Miss Marple only with assault rifles.” Jane Thistle and Phoebe Twigg are the sort of old ladies most women would like to be one day. And Mary Saums is the sort of writer you should be acquainted with now. —FAYE JONES

BEST ART EXHIBIT FEATURING SELF-MUTILATION: WHISPERING WIND’S “MEMORIES: ME, MOM AND MAO” AT THE FRIST

In 1989, Chinese artist Sheng Qi lopped off the little finger of his left hand in a ghastly act of political protest against the Tiananmen Square massacre. OK, so perhaps Sheng needed to work on his anger management skills. But he nevertheless made the most of his mutilation with “Memories: Me, Mom and Mao,” a photographic triptych that’s on display at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts as part of a Chinese photography exhibit called Whispering Wind. Sheng’s work showed images of his maimed hand holding wallet-size photos of himself as a child, his mother and Mao Zedong. The photo is certainly an eye-catching (or is that eye-averting?) political statement. But on a deeper level, it’s also an effective metaphor for the way totalitarian regimes scar individuals, families and societies. —JOHN PITCHER

BEST ART EXHIBIT FEATURING A SPIKY JESUS: BROTHER MEL AT THE ARTS COMPANY

Every year, this Marianist brother makes an artistic pilgrimage to Nashville to exhibit his works at The Arts Company. Brother Mel (his given name is Melvin Meyer) works in just about every conceivable medium—oil paintings, watercolors, sculptures and metal works. And he seems to prefer abstraction—this monk apparently never met a geometric shape that he didn’t want to paint and hang on a wall. But not surprisingly, his best works all seem to have religious themes. He has created sculptures of the Last Supper in which Christ and his disciples are all fashioned out of railroad spikes. He’s also designed crucifixes out of bits of discarded metal. Brother Mel plans to return to Nashville next year. Since he’ll be turning 80, the monk tells the Scene, “I’ll finally be old enough for a retrospective.” —JOHN PITCHER

BEST ARTS ADMINISTRATOR: MARK WAIT