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Articles by Jane Marcellus
Albert Gore Research Center
Advanced search American Journalism Latest Articles Submit an article Journal homepage Full Article Figures & data Citations Metrics Reprints & Permissions Read this article /doi/full/10.1080/08821127.2026.2698345?needAccess=true "Albert Gore Research Center." American Journalism, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2 Log in via your institution Access through your institution Log in to Taylor & Francis Online Log in Shibboleth Log in to Taylor & Francis Online Forgot password?
Book Review: Finding history in the ordinary
Book Review: Finding history in the ordinary 5 minutes ago by Jane Marcellus / Chapter16.org "I'll Make Me a World: The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month" / Harper
Book Review: Jarvis R. Givens examines the interlocking history of white, Black and Native schools
"American Grammar: Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation" By Jarvis R. Givens (Harper, 464 pages, $32) Jarvis R. Givens' "American Grammar: Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation" begins with a story.
‘Destroy This House’ Wrestles With the Unpredictability of Parents
There’s a scene in Amanda Uhle’s new memoir Destroy This House where the pre-adolescent narrator is navigating a pile of nearly empty shampoo bottles and a moldy loofah in the family’s only shower. They’ve just moved from a house with six-and-a-half baths in another city, and her hoarder mom refuses to toss bottles she brought along — even nearly empty ones.
Review: In ‘The Trouble of Color,’ Martha S. Jones explores the boundaries of racial identity
"THE TROUBLE OF COLOR: AN AMERICAN FAMILY MEMOIR" by Martha S. Jones (Basic Books, 336 pages, $30). 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.
Review: ‘Spell Freedom’ looks at literacy schools in the segregated South, including Monteagle’s Highlander Folk School
"SPELL FREEDOM: THE UNDERGROUND SCHOOLS THAT BUILT THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT" by Elaine Weiss (Atria / One Signal Publishers, 384 pages, $30). There are many tenacious individuals in Elaine Weiss' "Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement," but Esau Jenkins is among the most creative.
Grassroots Revolution
There are many tenacious individuals in Elaine Weiss’ Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement, but Esau Jenkins is among the most creative. A father and businessman who wanted a better life for himself, his children, and other Black people, Jenkins drove a refurbished school bus carrying neighbors from their homes on Johns Island, off the South Carolina coast, to jobs in Charleston in the 1950s. The bus wasn’t just a ride to work. It was a school.
Review: Rachel M. Hanson’s memoir, ‘The End of Tennessee,’ recounts her flight from abuse
"THE END OF TENNESSEE: A MEMOIR" by Rachel M. Hanson (University of South Carolina Press, 208 pages, $23). There's a scene in Rachel M. Hanson's "The End of Tennessee: A Memoir" where Rachel, age 15, is standing in the hallway of an East Tennessee theater where she is performing in "La Sylphide," a romantic ballet that premiered in Paris in the 19th century.
A Runaway’s Story
There’s a scene in Rachel M. Hanson’s The End of Tennessee: A Memoir where Rachel, aged 15, is standing in the hallway of an East Tennessee theater where she is performing in La Sylphide, a romantic ballet that premiered in Paris in the 19th century.
I Saw the Presidential Debates-America Is Becoming Ageist
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I Saw the Presidential Debates-America Is Becoming Ageist
When I was in my late 20s, I became obsessed with old age. The slow decline, the sagging skin, the faltering memory, the eventual demise—it all terrified me. To batten down the hatches against impending doom, I read up on nursing homes and assisted living and in-home care, arming myself with information about what—the knees or the memory—might go first. My fear wasn't about myself, but my mother. She was on the brink of 70, and I didn't know how to handle that. My mother herself was fine.
Ann Powers Shows Us How Joni Mitchell Made Her Own Way
Near the beginning of Ann Powers’ Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell, the NPR music critic writes about standing in her front yard to look at gathering storm clouds when a New York editor called to ask if she’d like to write about the singer-songwriter best known for 1960s folk hits such as “Both Sides Now” and “Big Yellow Taxi.” Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell By Ann Powers Dey Street Books 448 pages, $35 Powers will discuss her book at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, June 12, at Parnassus...
Forging an Autonomous Path
Near the beginning of Ann Powers’ Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell, the NPR music critic tells about standing in her front yard to look at gathering storm clouds when a New York editor called to ask if she’d like to write about the singer-songwriter best known for 1960s folk hits such as “Both Sides Now” and “Big Yellow Taxi.” Powers told the editor she needed a minute.
Confronting History
Soon after Danielle Chapman’s father was killed in a scuba diving accident while serving in the military in Okinawa, her paternal grandfather brought her and her mother to his ancestral home in Fairfield, Tennessee, where she spent much of her childhood and teen years. Living in a former tavern and antebellum farmhouse built in 1790, where she was steeped in the worldview very different from her own, she learned to love the South while questioning many of its values.
Rachel Louise Martin Chronicles the Battle to Desegregate an East Tennessee High School
A few chapters into A Most Tolerant Little Town, Rachel Louise Martin tells what happened on a Sunday morning in the fall of 1956, a few days after 12 Black students attempted to desegregate Clinton High School in East Tennessee.
History Happens
Opposite the title page in Drew Gilpin Faust’s Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury is an image of a letter the future historian and president of Harvard University wrote to President Dwight D. Eisenhower. “I am nine years old and I am white and I have many feelings about segregation,” she printed in pencil on lined notebook paper.
The Work of Secrecy
Growing up I had a cousin named Dimple who lived in Oak Ridge. She was 46 years older than me, the oldest cousin on that side of the family, while I was by far the youngest. Unlike her sister, who pinned her dark hair up in a tight French roll and seemed unapproachably austere, Dimple let her red curls blow about wantonly. The first time I met her, when I was 5, she pressed her forehead to mine and said we were “kissin’ cousins.” I always liked her.
Review: ‘A Most Tolerant Little Town’ chronicles the battle to desegregate an East Tennessee high school
"A MOST TOLERANT LITTLE TOWN: THE EXPLOSIVE BEGINNING OF SCHOOL DESEGREGATION" by Rachel Louise Martin (Simon & Schuster, 384 pages, $30). A few chapters into "A Most Tolerant Little Town," Rachel Louise Martin tells what happened on a Sunday morning in the fall of 1956, a few days after 12 Black students attempted to desegregate Clinton High School in East Tennessee.
Recalling the “Clinton 12”
A few chapters into A Most Tolerant Little Town, Rachel Louise Martin tells what happened on a Sunday morning in the fall of 1956, a few days after 12 Black students attempted to desegregate Clinton High School in East Tennessee.
50 Years, 50 Books
Humanities Tennessee celebrates its 50th birthday in 2023, and we're marking the occasion at Chapter 16 by celebrating 50 great Tennessee books published since 1973. Check the website this Friday, June 9, for the first in a series of posts about these notable books. We'll also be featuring essays on selected titles from the list, followed by an online discussion that everyone is welcome to join. First up is Richard Powers' Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Overstory.
An Oak Ridge Story
On the opening page of Emily Strasser’s Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History, she describes lying beneath flowered sheets in the safety of her grandmother’s house near Oak Ridge, transfixed by a photograph of her long-dead grandfather standing in front of a nuclear explosion. “I felt myself floating, unmoored from time and space, drawn by my grandfather’s eyes, eyes that knew everything yet said nothing,” she writes of her childhood memory.
How Dolly Parton Saved One Woman’s Life
At first blush, Lynn Melnick might not seem like someone whose life story would have anything to do with Dolly Parton or her music. The author of I’ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive: On Trauma, Persistence, and Dolly Parton grew up in Los Angeles listening to Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and other folk artists her blue-state Jewish parents loved. The author of three collections of poetry, she now lives in Brooklyn.
‘Reckoning’ Asks Us All to Come to Terms With Women’s Experience
Reckoning By V (formerly Eve Ensler) Bloomsbury Publishing 272 pages, $28 V will discuss Reckoning in conversation withAnn Patchett, 6:30 p.m., Monday, Feb. 6, at Parnassus Books There’s a line in Reckoning, the latest book by V (formerly Eve Ensler), in which she shares her frustration with getting people to understand what abuse, particularly rape, does to women.
A Piercing Wail
There’s a line in Reckoning, the latest book by V (formerly Eve Ensler), in which she shares her frustration with getting people to understand what abuse, particularly rape, does to women. “I have tried it with data and detachment, passion and pleading, existential despair,” writes the author best known for her 1996 play, The Vagina Monologues.
Fresh Voices and Excellent Writing
The Porch in Nashville is accepting submissions through March 10 for its annual prizes in fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. This year's judges are Destiny O. Birdsong, Nickole Brown, and Elissa Altman, and they are looking for "fresh voices and excellent writing." The contest is open to published or unpublished writers over 18, and the winners will receive a cash prize and publication in Nashville Review, as well as a gift certificate for classes at The Porch.
A Different Kind of Promise
At first blush, Lynn Melnick might not seem like someone whose life story would have anything to do with Dolly Parton or her music. The author of I’ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive: On Trauma, Persistence, and Dolly Parton grew up in Los Angeles listening to Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and other folk artists her blue-state Jewish parents loved. The author of three collections of poetry, she now lives in Brooklyn.
Review: Joy Harjo’s latest book seeks to understand the work of poetry and place
"CATCHING THE LIGHT" by Joy Harjo (Yale University Press, 128 pages, $18). In one of the 50 vignettes that make up "Catching the Light," Joy Harjo tells of receiving an image via Facebook Messenger from an old friend in Lukachukai, a mountainous area of the Navajo Nation in Arizona. The friend describes the scene around him -- mesa views and the sound of his sister's old truck revving up for a morning's work and the scent of piñon pines and strong coffee.
Flowers Blooming in a Blizzard
In one of the 50 vignettes that make up Catching the Light, Joy Harjo tells of receiving an image via Facebook Messenger from an old friend in Lukachukai, a mountainous area of the Navajo Nation in Arizona. The friend describes the scene around him — mesa views and sound of his sister’s old truck revving up for a morning’s work and the scent of piñon pines and strong coffee.
Blooming in a Blizzard
Actual blizzards are rare in Tennessee (thank goodness!), but the chaos of living can feel as bewildering as a blizzard sometimes, for all of us. Poet and memoirist Joy Harjo grapples with this all-too-human confusion in her new collection of prose, Catching the Light, and finds the antidote in art. “It is the singers, poets, and storytellers who are captured by the expression of this eternal drama, and with language, metaphor, timing, and melody create meaningful shape.
Sharing the Joy
Chapter 16's founding editor, Margaret Renkl, probably wouldn't want us linking to her New York Times column two weeks in a row, but we can't resist sharing "The Joy of Finding People Who Love the Same Books You Do" — and not just because of the shout-out to the Southern Festival of Books or the touching reference to Queen Elizabeth's corgis.
Rolling Back History
Becca Andrews grew up in a conservative West Tennessee town and graduated in 2013 from Middle Tennessee State University, where she was my student. She then moved to California, where she earned a master’s in journalism from the University of California at Berkeley in 2015 and worked for seven years on the staff of Mother Jones magazine. Her new book, No Choice: The Destruction of Roe v.
A Different Appalachian Upbringing
One of the early memories Neema Avashia recounts in Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place happens just outside the South Charleston Junior Women’s Club, sometime in the mid-1980s. Neema, about five years old, is running around with her friends, popping salted peanuts into cups of Coke to watch the brown foam bubble up over their small hands.
Party Invitation
Save the date! The 2022 Southern Festival of Books is still a few months away, but Humanities Tennessee will be offering a glimpse of this year's author lineup at a reveal party on July 7. The in-person gathering will be held at the Tennessee State Library and Archives in Nashville, with the announcement portion livestreamed on Facebook. The event is free, but attendees are asked to register in advance.
Tennessee Republicans turn to mail regulation to restrict abortion
Three days after Politico published the Supreme Court's leaked draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, R, signed a law making his state the latest to regulate distribution of mifepristone and misoprostol, the two pills (generally taken two days apart) used to induce a medication abortion.
Exploring the Archive
We focus primarily on new books and current author news here at Chapter 16, but over the past 13 years the site has built a large archive of reviews, interviews, excerpts, and essays that we believe would interest C16 readers today. We used to include archive links in this weekly newsletter, but that's not as effective as bringing those pieces to the front page of the site and sharing them in our regular social media posts, where more readers can access them.
Tracking a Killer
Near the end of Kathryn Miles’ Trailed: One Woman’s Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders, the author recalls the day someone asked her why she was so determined to help discover who killed Julie Williams and Lollie Winans in Shenandoah National Park in May 1996. The two women, trained backcountry leaders in their 20s, beloved in their respective communities, had been found dead — bound, gagged, throats slit — at their campsite near a stretch of the Appalachian Trail that runs through the park.
Destiny O. Birdsong’s Protagonists Are True to Themselves in Nobody’s Magic
The morning after Agnes Cherie Kirkkendoll first spends the night with her new boyfriend Primus, he comes into the kitchen to announce unceremoniously, “I read up on you.” Agnes, one of three protagonists in Destiny O. Birdsong’s Nobody’s Magic, has reason to believe the police are after her and is afraid she’s been in the news. “What about?” she asks. “That thing you have.
Stepping into Their Own Power
The morning after Agnes Cherie Kirkkendoll first spends the night with her new boyfriend, Prime, he comes into the kitchen to announce unceremoniously, “I read up on you.” Agnes, one of three protagonists in Destiny O. Birdsong’s Nobody’s Magic, has reason to believe the police are after her and is afraid she’s been in the news. “What about?” she asks. “That thing you have.
Kate Daniels’ Slow Fuse of the Possible
On the opening page of Slow Fuse of the Possible: A Memoir of Poetry and Psychoanalysis, poet Kate Daniels makes a provocative statement about the several years she spent with an analyst. "Sometimes, it was like walking into the intensely compressed words of a poem itself," she writes.
Kate Daniels’ Slow Fuse of the Possible Stands Along a Psychological Edge
On the opening page of Slow Fuse of the Possible: A Memoir of Poetry and Psychoanalysis, poet Kate Daniels makes a provocative statement about the several years she spent with an analyst. “Sometimes, it was like walking into the intensely compressed words of a poem itself,” she writes.
Like Walking into a Poem
On the opening page of Slow Fuse of the Possible: A Memoir of Poetry and Psychoanalysis, poet Kate Daniels makes a provocative statement about the several years she spent with an analyst. “Sometimes, it was like walking into the intensely compressed words of a poem itself,” she writes.
Gratitude
When the coronavirus pandemic hit full force in March of 2020, I suspect most of us never thought we'd still be in the midst of it almost two years later, yet here we are. In the face of so much hardship and loss, the disruptions to publishing and literary culture can seem pretty unimportant, but they're of a piece with the struggles we've all been facing, and it's only right to recognize how hard many folks have worked to get books in readers' hands and keep the conversation going.
Little Lost Girl
My father worked at a store called AMC, a “big box” before generics like Costco and Walmart became ubiquitous. Dubbed “The House of Name Brands” by the four brothers who opened it in Oklahoma City in the early 1960s, AMC was built to look like a giant circus tent with points made of poured concrete. It was massive and bright and cluttered inside. Everything was cheap.
Always a Circling Back
In a chapter of Jesse Graves’ Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place in which he discusses mid-20th-century Knoxville author James Agee, Graves evokes his own childhood in Sharps Chapel, Tennessee, about 40 miles north of Knoxville. Jesse Graves “I grew up in a remote, essentially eerie place way out in the country, with no neighbors or lights from other houses in sight,” Graves writes.
Joy Harjo’s Poet Warrior Illuminates Her Journey With Words
Near the beginning of Poet Warrior: A Memoir, Joy Harjo recalls her ability as a small child to leave her body at night. Rising up, she would see herself wrapped in a blanket on her small cot, then move through the wall to see her father sleeping beneath a chenille bedspread.
A Light on in the Mica Windows
Near the beginning of Poet Warrior: A Memoir, Joy Harjo recalls her ability as a small child to leave her body at night. Photo: Shawn Miller Rising up, she would see herself wrapped in a blanket on her small cot, then move through the wall to see her father sleeping beneath a chenille bedspread.
Jenn Shapland's new book combines a memoir with the story of writer Carson McCullers
Jane Marcellus and Chapter16.org, Special to the News Sentinel Published 7:00 a.m. ET Jan. 31, 2020 Today's libraries are not just for books anymore. From famous artwork to sports gear, there are tons of items libraries have to lend. Buzz60 Growing up, Jenn Shapland didn’t know much about Carson McCullers. Although she’d heard of McCullers’ novels, including "The Member of the Wedding" and "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter," she hadn’t read them.
#MeToo has been almost 200 years in the making
In the late 1980s, I lived my own #MeToo moment, working in a newsroom where an editor showed up at my apartment uninvited on the pretense of discussing a story assignment — but wanting sex. Although he didn’t force himself when I said no, he routinely greeted me and other female reporters in the newsroom with vulgar comments (usually “Wanna f????”) and interrupted professional conversations to remark on women’s bodies. I consulted an attorney. Told to confront him, I did so.
I’m a single woman. I decided to change my last name anyway.
When I was 34 years old, I legally changed my last name. I wasn’t getting married. I wasn’t taking back my “maiden” name after a divorce. I wasn’t getting rid of a long-hated name, something that was embarassingly similar to words you’d find scribbled on stalls in a middle school bathroom. I was a single woman, and I wanted to name myself. So Jane Berry became Jane Marcellus. At 34, I had not ruled out getting married one day.
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