WYPL Book Talk

Vince Vawter has over forty years experience in the newspaper industry. In 2013, he published his first autobiographically inspire novel Paperboy, which was widely acclaimed and won a Newberry Honor. Today we'll be talking about its sequel, Copyboy, which is published by Capstone. His protagonist, Victor Vollmer has a stutter, much like Vince has. In order to honor Vince and Victor's situation, I won't be editing our conversation as I normally do. It has only been cut for length. You'll hear Vince in his true voice, and you'll hear me in mine.

Debby Schriver to the program today. Debby is a writer of nonfiction who lives in Knoxville, TN and her previous books include, To Read My Heart, the Journal of Rachel Van Dyke 1810-1811, In the Footsteps of Champions: The University of Tennessee Lady Volunteers, the First Three Decades, Ice ’n’ Go: Score in Sports and Life,co-written with noted athletic trainer, Jenny Moshak. Today we'll be talking about her most recent book, Whispering in the Daylight: The Children of Tony Alamo’s Christian Ministry and Their Journey to Freedom, which looks at the religious cult started by Tony and Susan Alamo in the late 1960s in Southern California and expanded to Western Arkansas in the mid 1970s and continued to exploit adults and children alike for five decades.

Lisa Patton is a native Memphian and the author of the novels, Whistlin' Dixie in a Nor'easter, Yankee Doodle Dixie, and Southern as a Second Language. Today we'll be talking about her new novel, Rush, which follows three different women in the world of a southern university sorority.

Beatriz Williams left behind the world of international corporate consulting to become a best-selling writer of historical fiction. Her books include A Certain Age, The Wicked World, and Cocoa Beach known collectively as The Jazz Age Novels. Her The Schuyler Sisters Novels are: Along the Infinite Sea, Tiny Little Thing, and The Secret Life of Violent Grant. She has also penned three stand-alones, A Hundred Summers, Overseas, and today we'll be talking about the third, her newest one, The Summer Wives, which is set over the course of three summers in three different decades on an exclusive summer vacation island located off the northeast tip of Long Island.

Joe Watson Hackl is an attorney in South Carolina, but today we'll be talking about her debut novel for younger readers and up, which is set in her native state of Mississippi. While not autobiographical in terms of plot, Jo's love of the Mississippi countryside is one of the major aspects of Smack Dab in the Middle of Maybe.

Kimberly Belle (Left) with Linda Lloyd (right)

Linda Lloyd talks to Kimberly Belle about her fourth novel, Three Days Missing.(Park Row Books)  From the publisher: It’s every parent’s worst nightmare: the call that comes in the middle of the night. When Kat Jenkins awakens to the police on her doorstep, her greatest fear is realized. Her nine-year-old son, Ethan, is missing—vanished from the cabin where he’d been on an overnight class trip. Shocked and distraught, Kat rushes to the campground, but she’s too late; the authorities have returned from their search empty-handed after losing Ethan’s trail in the mountain forest.

Caleb Johnson has worked as a small-town newspaper reporter, an early-morning janitor, and a whole-animal butcher, among other jobs, but today we'll be talking about his debut novel, Treeborne,(Picador) which is the story of the Treeborne family, spanning three generations in a small Alabama town and the countryside land that they hold dear.

Hannah Pittard is the head of the creative writing program at the University of Kentucky. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Oxford American, McSweeney's among many others. She is the winner of the 2006 Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award. Her novels are, Reunion, The Fates, Listen to Me, and in this episode, we talk about her fourth published novel, Visible Empire, available from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. It's the story of grieving, greed, and racial oppression in Atlanta in the aftermath of Airfrance Flight 007 which crashed in Paris and killed over 100 of the richest white Atlantans of the early 1960s.

Blake McVey talks to Memphis author Rob Sangster about the third installment of his Jack Strider series, No Return, which has his hero in the crosshairs of wealthy investors and foreign governments alike who are chasing after control of rare-earth mineral mines.

Blake McVey talks with Professor Wayne Wiegand about his book, The Desegregation of Public Libraries in the Jim Crow South: Civil Rights and Local Activism, which he co-wrote with legal scholar (and his wife) Professor Shirley Wiegand.  From LSU Press: The Wiegands trace the struggle for equal access to the years before the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, when black activists in the South focused their efforts on equalizing accommodations, rather than on the more daunting—and dangerous—task of undoing segregation. After the ruling, momentum for vigorously pursuing equality grew, and black organizations shifted to more direct challenges to the system, including public library sit-ins and lawsuits against library systems. Although local groups often took direction from larger civil rights organizations, the energy, courage, and determination of younger black community members ensured the eventual desegregation of Jim Crow public libraries. The Wiegands examine the library desegregation movement in several southern cities and states, revealing the ways that individual communities negotiated—mostly peacefully, sometimes violently—the integration of local public libraries.