This year, we decided to throw open our annual preview coverage of the Southern Festival of Books to all of the Scene’s arts reviewers. (Indeed, we’re genuinely lucky to have a group of film and music critics more literate than most former English majors.) The list below, which highlights 17 authors appearing over the next few days, doesn’t try to be comprehensive. Rather, we encouraged our contributors to find writers about whom they believed they could write with passion. We told them to look for the overlooked; we told them to keep an eye out for more established writers who were bucking off their signature styles for new, riskier approaches or who, like Bobbie Ann Mason, were approaching subject matter they’d heretofore left unexplored (in this case Elvis Presley).

Owing to space considerations, we decided to cover almost no authors who had received a full review in our pages in the last year or so, but you can check out what our book critics have to say about Tom Franklin or Jeff Hardin or Chris Offutt, as well as many others, by searching the book reviews archived on our Web site, at www.nashvilllescene.com. For the moment, we hope you’ll feel sufficiently excited about the following poets, short story writers, essayists, novelists, and memoirists to attend their readings and panels, along with those of the better-known authors, during this weekend’s Southern Festival of Books, presented by Humanities Tennessee.

Note: Schedule subject to change; check www.tn-humanities.org/sessions.htm for updates.

Pearl Cleage writes love stories. Reduced to a bare-bones plot, each of her three novels is about the way a troubled woman finds true love and a higher moral purpose in the arms of a powerful, handsome man who loves her just as she is, flaws and all. Every trope of female fantasy can be found in every Cleage novel—talk, touch, acceptance, faithfulness, protection—and always a happy, predictable ending. Wedding cake, anyone? If Cleage’s novels aren’t exactly nuanced literature, nor are they merely all-black Harlequin romances: They’re also compelling how-to manuals for healing African American communities. Like her first novel, an Oprah pick called What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, and its sequel, I Wish I Had a Red Dress, Cleage’s new book, Some Things I Thought I’d Never Do, offers an undisguised social agenda: waking young black women up to the power they have to transform the world. Standing between African American women and that power, of course, is a crushing throng of obstacles, from racism to drugs to AIDS to teen pregnancy to the violence these women too often face at the hands of young, predatory black men. “The purpose of my writing, often, is to express the point where racism and sexism meet,” Cleage has said. In addition to her unflinching assessment of such seemingly intractable problems, the author proposes reasonable and—more to the point—attainable solutions to them all. Her novels are nothing less than dramatized instructions for how African American women, by insisting on their own dignity and by securing their own autonomy, can have the power to save African American culture itself—and, not coincidentally, how they might find true love and great sex at the same time.—Margaret Renkl

Cleage appears noon-1 p.m. Friday, Oct. 10 in the Nashville Public Library Auditorium.

The now defunct “Penguin Lives” series delivered short biographies of famous figures, written by well-known authors with a unique insight into their subject. Kentucky-bred writer Bobbie Ann Mason drew one of the series’ final assignments, to discuss the life and meaning of Elvis Presley from a Southern perspective. Her 160-page jaunt through Presley’s life hits the high points in entertaining, readable fashion, rushing from his dirt farmer background to his Sun Records breakthrough—then RCA, the army, the movies, the comeback, Vegas and death. Mason admits in her acknowledgments that she’s mostly summarizing Peter Guralnick’s “monumental, definitive” two-volume biography of Elvis. Given that most of this story has been told before (and admittedly better), what’s left for her to do is to give a sense of what it must’ve been like to grow up in Mississippi and Memphis and then to become a pop culture phenomenon. Though Mason’s reminiscences of small-town diner burgers and cold Coke read a little corny, her retelling of the Presley family’s moves into ever nicer homes has the requisite touch of pathos. What ultimately hamstrings the author are the facts of the case. She promises at the outset not to dwell on Elvis’ scandals or his immensely wasted talent, but ultimately Mason ends up checking off all the bad choices that the King of Rock ’n’ Roll made, and she has a hard time—as anyone would—with offering any new meaning beyond her own sad shake of the head. —Noel Murray

Mason appears 2-3 p.m. Friday, Oct. 10 in the Nashville Public Library Auditorium; she also joins John Egerton (see below) and Chris Offutt in a panel discussion, “Kentucky Generations: Memories and Memoirs,” 3-4:30 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 12 in Room 16 of Legislative Plaza.

In the swell of the Southern Festival of Books’ famous names and publishers, poets with a single collection and those sponsored by less well-known presses can be overlooked. But it would be a shame for Nashvillians who enjoy the tough-minded marriage of story and song to miss the appearances of Sarah Kennedy and Beth Ann Fennelly at this year’s gathering. Both native Midwesterners, Kennedy and Fennelly write poems that plumb love’s complexities, especially the kind that begins with our original families and becomes repeated, for better and for worse, with marriage and children. Double Exposure, Kennedy’s award-winning collection published by the Cleveland State Poetry Center, uses verse as a vehicle for memoir, which achieves a moral imperative in her hands: Memoir, for this poet, isn’t a means of navel-gazing or an excuse for solipsism; instead, it’s an art form that requires telling the truth unprettified by good manners or the comforts of beauty. Fennelly’s conversational and winningly humorous style doesn’t ignore the heart’s sorrows, as indicated by a poem titled “Not to Be Read at Your Wedding,” from her book Open House, published by Zoo Press and winner of the 2001 Kenyon Review Prize. Kennedy and Fennelly are hard-hitting poets whose work offers many accessible—and essential—pleasures. —Diann Blakely

Kennedy joins Bill Brown, David Rigsbee and R.T. Smith (see below) in a panel discussion, “Narrating Life’s Journey: Poetry,” 2-3:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 10 in Room 31 of Legislative Plaza.

Fennelly joins Claudia Emerson (see below) and Jeff Hardin in a panel discussion, “The Texture of Words: Southern Poets,” 1:30-3 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 12 in Nashville Public Library, Conf. Room III.

One of the most prolific writers to return to the festival, R.T. Smith will see two new collections of verse published this year, The Hollow Log Lounge and Brightwood. These are books of homecoming, in a way, since Smith’s previous two volumes, Messenger and Trespasser, sprang largely from his experiences in Ireland. The Emerald Isle seems to possess a special hold on Southern poets, and it’s often pointed out that the 20th century’s greatest literary flowerings took place contemporaneously here and in Ireland. Nonetheless, Smith always remains conscious of two paradoxes: feeling at home in a place where he will always be a foreigner, despite his own blood ancestry, and knowing that Ireland’s beauty—like the South’s—coexists with a history almost unbearably cruel. Brightwood, like its predecessors, interweaves shamelessly lovely descriptions and images of nature with constant, aching awareness of the workings of original sin within the confines of family and history; but Smith’s ambition, like one of Yeats’ gyres, continues to widen. “Voices, Traces, the Whip-poor-will’s Plea,” one of the book’s many standout poems, recalls, on an ominously beautiful summer night, the story of a long-ago lynching: “The voice in the treeline votes to punish ... / Wisteria / vines tendril a green lash.” Smith’s gifts as a consummate storyteller, coupled with a lyricism that becomes richer and more resonant with each book, deserve the festival’s fullest house. —Diann Blakely

Smith joins Bill Brown, David Rigsbee and Sarah Kennedy in a panel, “Narrating Life’s Journey: Poetry,” 2-3:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 10 in Room 31 of Legislative Plaza.

The University Press of Mississippi has produced a handsome volume for Will D. Campbell’s latest hymn to the sacred history of the state’s civil rights struggle. Robert G. Clark’s Journey to the House: A Black Politician’s Story is an impressionistic blend of reportage, social history, poetry and personal imaginings that at times captures the elusive dignity of veterans of righteous wars. Campbell portrays scenes charged with historical and personal significance with as much of an eye toward their possibilities for mythic storytelling as for their literal truth value. He does not write biography; he preaches the gospel of how he, as a white Southern man, was saved by the valor of black pioneers. Clark keeps the book grounded. A gregarious, humble character ill at ease with the author’s attempts to make him a symbol, he shines through the pages as the best kind of hero: a nearly invisible one. He blazes a trail through the civil rights era without stopping to analyze his significance or receive accolades. And his effectiveness is confirmed by his seeming unawareness that he should now become an icon. Instead, he wants to talk about the latest bill, yesterday’s committee, the work left to be done—and not at the level of ideals, but as throughout his life, at the level of putting one foot in front of the other and politely requesting his adversaries to get out of his way. Campbell’s style may be too much hagiography for some tastes, but his subject doesn’t stand still long enough for him to gild the halo. —Donna Bowman

Will D. Campbell appears 3-4 p.m. Friday, Oct. 10 at Nashville Public Library, Conf. Room IA.

For a girl growing up in 1950s Puerto Rico, “Consuelo” isn’t just a name, it’s a fate—a lifetime sentence of giving comfort and consolation to others. But words offer escape as well as confinement in Judith Ortiz Cofer’s haunting novel The Meaning of Consuelo, even if Cofer’s adolescent heroine encounters mostly the latter. Language, in the San Juan household of young Consuelo, is mostly an adult’s tool for enforcing and passing down strict social codes and gender roles. As her name suggests, Consuelo is destined to be the dark, serious child, while her bubbly little sister Mili will be the “ray of tropical sunshine” who brightens the house with her giggles and nonsense speech. When the decade closes, though, the outwardly happy household will crumble, the child of light will descend into darkness, and the daughter named for consolation must decide to take care of herself. As Consuelo blossoms from bookish schoolgirl to determined señorita, Cofer details the simultaneous invasion of America’s brazen, can-do ’50s futurism—its siren song of burgers, sleek cars and rock ’n’ roll—at the expense of the island’s own culture and its lingering European customs. A Puerto Rican native with an acclaimed earlier novel, The Line of the Sun, and several volumes of poetry, essays and personal remembrance to her credit, Cofer captures the country’s and Consuelo’s bittersweet progress in a rueful, lyrical, sometimes bracingly sarcastic narrative voice, and her prose is gracefully spiced with island slang and untranslated Spanish. If she drops a few too many portentous hints about the tragedía to come, the novel still maintains its mysterious, almost tidal pull to the last page—when Consuelo breaks with the destiny foretold by her name. —Jim Ridley

Judith Ortiz Cofer appears 3-4 p.m. Friday, Oct. 10 in Room 30 of Legislative Plaza.

“You do not want what you’ve been taught to want,” Martha tells herself at the end of Victoria Lancelotta’s first novel, Far, and that realization is the whole point of this piercing, passionate book: how hard it is to discover what you really want when all the people around you have marshaled their forces to make you want something else. What Martha has been taught to want is unsurprising: a husband, a home, children and, perhaps most of all, safety. And in Martha’s world, the fastest route to safety is that ancient bargain between men and women: sex for protection. This trade-off is what takes girls safely from their fathers’ homes to their husbands’ without a moment of solitude, reflection or revelation in between. But Martha’s having none of that. Even in adolescence, with the nuns at her Catholic school breathing their sour breath right down her neck, she trades sex for nothing more than the pleasure it gives, to herself not least. But by the time Martha is grown, at 30 still picking up guys in gritty bars, even her best friend is furious at her for this flagrant cultivation of “relationships” that offer physical connection and nothing else. In rejecting the domestic world, Martha isn’t sure herself whether she’s being arrogant and judgmental, or simply a failure. The journey she takes, literally and figuratively, to find out what she wants provides the narrative structure to this darkly beautiful debut novel by Nashville’s most promising young writer. —Margaret Renkl

Lancelotta joins Theresa Williams and Sheila Williams in a panel discussion, “Fractured Pasts: Fiction by and About Women,” 3-4:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 10 at Nashville Public Library, Conf. Room II.

Melinda Haynes’ great strength is her understanding of small-town Southern life. Her best-selling debut, Mother of Pearl, established the Alabama-based author’s reputation for creating tragic rustic characters. In her latest novel, Willem’s Field, 70-year-old protagonist Willem Fremont is a retired businessman on a chaotic pilgrimage to his hometown, Purvis, Miss. Throughout his life, Fremont has suffered from panic disorder; by returning to the family farm, he hopes to rid himself of his demons and find peace before his death. Instead, he runs headlong into the land’s current owners, the Tills, a broken family with their own set of obsessions and disabilities. Haynes, who suffers from panic attacks herself, is not so unimaginative as to seek catharsis by making a doppelganger of Fremont. Rather, the disorder is a plot device that, while exploring the violent impulsivity of her condition, also paints a compassionate picture of life in the rural South. In the tradition of great Southern narrators such as Harper Lee and Flannery O’Connor, the slow-speed collision of Haynes’ failing characters vividly displays the region’s tendency to be insular yet quietly tolerant of society’s discarded. And like those writers, Haynes’ prose is extremely confident, giving her novel a sense of wisdom and experience that, albeit quirky, feels as if it’s rooted in the Southern soil itself. —Paul Griffith

Haynes appears with Meghan Daum in a panel, “New Places, New Possibilities: Novels,” 10-11 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 11 at Nashville Public Library, Conf. Room IB.

If readers know anything about Homer Hickam, it’s that he grew up in West Virginia dreaming of building rockets. Following an engineering career that included 17 years at NASA, he wrote Rocket Boys and created a cottage industry for his hometown of Coalwood, W.Va. Two other memoirs and a space novel followed. In his latest, The Keeper’s Son, Hickam has traded Coalwood and rockets for a small island on the Outer Banks. The inhabitants of Killakeet, N.C., are as colorful as those of Coalwood, and just as sharp. They know the dangers of the sea because they have not only built a town from the reclaimed lumber of shipwrecks, they have also rescued victims of those vessels. During World War II, the North Carolina coast becomes even deadlier when German U-Boats stalk the area. From the first mention of Capt. Otto von Krebs, it is obvious that he will come face to face with native Killakeeter-turned-Coast Guard captain Josh Thurlow. Destiny—and a good author—ensure that theirs will be a meeting of matched wits and spirits (think Pacino and De Niro in Heat). But this isn’t just a war story with intense battle scenes; it is also a bittersweet tale with comic relief, a surprising amount of romance and a fantastic twist of fate. There’s magic in the title. —MiChelle Jones

Hickam appears noon-1 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 11 in Room 29 of Legislative Plaza.

Until its recent reissue, Birney Imes’ collection of photographs, Juke Joints, risked falling into not just obscurity, but ghostlike legend. His work was out there—on the cover of Lucinda Williams’ Car Wheels on a Gravel Road; as inspiration for the interior of Memphian Isaac Tigrett’s House of Blues—but used copies of the book were going for upwards of a thousand dollars. The University of Mississippi Press, though, saw fit to rectify matters, and today Juke Joints is once again in print, featuring an introductory essay by author Richard Ford. Taken in the 1980s, Imes’ photographs of roadhouses and African American cafes throughout the Mississippi Delta are at once haunting, yet strangely soothing. In places with names like the Pink Pony or the Evening Star, time slows and figures pass in and out of the frame like hazy apparitions. Even a simple still-life of aged posters on a wall becomes active with color and intensity. With each scene, whether of young men playfully posturing inside a pool hall or a bar during a slow stretch of afternoon, there’s a story, and it roots you in place with wide-eyed wonder. Like any good artistry, though, nothing is obvious; these images keep the viewer returning to look again and again, determined to figure out what might have happened in these places and to these people, many of them now long gone. Such beckoning connection is a testament not only to Imes and his abilities, but more importantly to the deep mysteries of something captured without pretense. —Lacey Galbraith

Imes appears 1-2 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 11 at Nashville Public Library, Conf. Room IB.

Sena Jeter Naslund, best known for her 1999 Moby Dick pastiche Ahab’s Wife, turns her attention to the wounded heart of her native South in Four Spirits, a patchwork page-turner about 1963 Birmingham that culminates in the church bombing that killed four African American girls. Naslund piles up characters who provide a kaleidoscopic view of Birmingham society: rich, poor, black, white, old, young, bigoted, enlightened. Her central character, Stella, is an educated, sensitive 20-year-old desperately grasping for meaning in her conflicted world. She is hyperaware of her culture teetering in the balance, of changes arriving like an onrushing tide. In short, almost sound-bite chapters that skip breathlessly around the many stories that make up Four Spirits, Naslund manages to show us nearly every major historical event of 1963, through one character’s eyes or another’s. It does seem a bit odd to call a book of more than 500 pages “breathless,” and Naslund’s insistence on the transcendent significance of so very many events, places and crises is unsustainable over the long haul. But in short chunks, the novel has melodramatic force. It’s best read as a historical epic, rather than a Great Southern Novel. In that context, its characters can breathe their own air without the pressure of defining their time and place. —Donna Bowman

Sena Jeter Naslund appears 2:30-3:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 11 in the Nashville Public Library Auditorium.

Sex, drugs and lessons hard learned are prerequisite to the writing of any rock ’n’ roll memoir. Within the pages of countless tomes are the retellings of late-night studio sessions and journeys into the heart of dark nightclubs. Memories are made into legends, but often at the expense of telling the reader about the music that made the artist famous in the first place. Marshall Chapman, in her literary debut Goodbye Little Rock and Roller, understands this, for each chapter in the memoir corresponds to a particular song in her career. Like a prose version of writers-in-the-round, Chapman reveals the inspiration for her music and tells tales that make the rest of us seem like boring old prudes. Chapter 3, “Running Out in the Night,” chronicles her first few crazy years in Nashville, when she was just beginning to develop her own style and write her own material; there’s a near nervous breakdown, a retreat to Pawley’s Island and a crashing of the gate at Fenway Park during game six of the 1975 World Series. Later, in one of the more moving sections, Chapman explains how the song “Bad Debt,” a tune written in response to two not-so-perfect boyfriends, serves as a connecting point between herself and the inmates at the Tennessee State Prison for Women. Chapman’s style is conversational, like she’s onstage introducing the next tune or in your living room holding court. The stories are wide and discursive, often involving countless characters and a lot of switching back and forth in time. In the end, though, the heart is always circled back upon, and perhaps this is why the book succeeds: It’s got a lot of heart. Chapman tells it like it is, with a candor that’s often irreverent but always full of intelligence and humor. —Lacey Galbraith

Chapman appears 3-4 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 11 in Room 29 of Legislative Plaza.

Readers of Edward P. Jones’ vital new novel The Known World are likely to find it nothing short of revelatory. The foundation of the book is a remarkable, little-mentioned bit of history that makes the South’s tempestuous past seem even stormier than before. The institution of slavery as practiced between blacks provides the surprising basis of Jones’ narrative. Set in 1850s Virginia, the novel focuses on Henry Townsend, a free black man, and his wife Caldonia. When the two set up on a new farm, they buy a slave named Moses to serve as overseer—an odd transaction for Henry, himself a former slave, but one Virginia society seems to take in stride. Moving outward from the Townsends, the book explores the class system of the state at large, featuring a broad cast of characters that includes sheriff John Skiffington, who opposes the owning of slaves but doggedly fulfills his duty of apprehending those who escape, and William Robbins, Henry’s vicious former master, who has fallen in love with a black woman. Writing with a wonderful eye for detail, as well as a gift for Southern syntax, Jones conflates traditional notions of freedom and bondage, guilt and innocence, owner and slave, offering a vision of history that’s different—and more disturbing—than the one many of us know. He also supplies some startling insights into the master-slave relationship. “Once you own them, once you own one, you will never be alone,” Robbins says at one point. “Henry had thought that a good thing,” Jones writes later, “never to be alone, to always have someone.” This is an astonishing admission where slavery is concerned, one of many in a beautifully crafted book that provides new perspectives on the culture of the South. A Virginia-based author, Jones was nominated for the National Book Award in 1992 for his collection of stories, Lost in the City. —Julie Hale

Edward Jones joins Tom Franklin and Robert Morgan in a panel discussion, “The Relevant Past: Historical Novels,” 3:30-5 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 11 in the Nashville Public Library Auditorium.

Claudia Emerson Andrews’ poems are redolent with our regional soil and its seasonal varieties: the fragrances of raw spring earth; summer-mud lusciousness; frosted, autumnal fields stripped to dirt after harvest; and the oddly fecund smell of ground hollowed and deepened for a midwinter funeral. Indeed, there’s a lot of dead chill in Emerson Andrews’ work. In “Cleaning the Graves,” a poem from Pharaoh, Pharaoh, her 1997 collection, she describes herself as “descended from...loss.” Her grandmother was “a woman who trapped / snowbirds for potpie, who let hens nest / in the kitchen in freezing weather / so they would lay better, who could wring their heads / from their bodies in one motion”; her mother tells the author that her blood too is that cold, “but you don’t know it yet, never / had hard times.” Emerson Andrews’ South is tobacco country, once composed of small farms and now owned by corporations, its inhabitants mostly fled to cities but feeling that loss of place like the ache of an amputated limb—not because that place was one they loved, but because it defined them. Her second volume, Pinion, spoken in the alternating voices of a brother and sister, takes these themes even deeper, but neither this book nor Pharaoh, Pharaoh feels ultimately grim. Emerson Andrews’ language is gorgeous but reticent, aware, always, that it remains in service to a larger task: commemorating, even celebrating, her family and the hard ground from which it sprang. —Diann Blakely

Emerson Andrews joins Jeff Hardin and Beth Ann Fennelly in a panel, “The Texture of Words: Southern Poets,” 1:30-3 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 12 in Nashville Public Library, Conf. Room III.

Mississippi in the mid 1950s and ’60s was not the ideal place to grow up if you happened to be black. Still, W. Ralph Eubanks, now director of publishing at the Library of Congress, felt he’d had a mostly pleasant childhood. With a schoolteacher mother and a county agent father, the Eubanks family found middle-class refuge on their 80-acre farm. For a long time, the author maintained this protective space by staying away from his home state. Ever Is a Long Time discusses his reaction to finding his parents’ names listed in the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission files and his subsequent return home to clarify the past. Created in 1957, the Sovereignty Commission distributed propaganda for the segregationist cause. Later, its role was expanded to keep tabs on anyone—black or white—deemed dangerous to the status quo. Though fully funded by Mississippi’s taxpayers, the commission was not generally known of until the late 1990s, when its files were opened to the public. Along with the names of civil rights workers, community leaders and members of the NAACP, the commission monitored those whose only apparent transgression was that they were both black and educated. At times, Ever Is a Long Time seems like much ado about nothing—which isn’t to say that the idea of the files isn’t disturbing. It is merely that Eubanks talks about his shock and fear more than he is able to convey them. Nevertheless, the book is interesting not only in terms of examining the past, but also in the context of the present day. The confrontations the author expects (with supporters of the commission, for example) don’t materialize—which says a lot about changes in society, even as the commission’s files may remind us a little too much of the Patriot Act. —MiChelle Jones

Eubanks joins Elaine Neil Orr and Gary Gildner in a panel, “Those That Came Before: Family Memoirs,” 2-3:30 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 12 in Room 30 of Legislative Plaza.

It’s nice to think that a pan of steaming-hot cornpone has the power to heal our fractured homeland. That’s the gentle assumption behind author/editor John Egerton’s Cornbread Nation 1, the first volume in a series of collected essays, stories and poems dedicated to celebrating and preserving the South’s great culinary heritage. Egerton’s anthology is no mere dissertation on cornbread. For him and his colleagues, corn serves as a metaphor for the populist idealism inherent in America’s founding principles—and “the distance between cornfield and cornbread,” they note, “is growing fast.” The book covers a wide range of subjects designed to invite us back to the dinner table and the kitchen, where, it is hoped, the work of reconciliation can begin. Published in association with the Southern Foodways Alliance and the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture, the volume consists of 50 entries culled from some of the South’s best writers. Included are Roy Blount Jr., who expounds on his collection of songs about food; Julia Reed, whose essay deals with the blue crab’s addictive properties; and Brett Anderson, whose poignant “Dinner With Moth” describes a dinner date postponed forever due to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. —Paul Griffith

Egerton appears with Bobbie Ann Mason and Chris Offutt in a panel discussion, “Kentucky Generations: Memories and Memoirs,” 3-4:30 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 12 in Room 16 of Legislative Plaza.