Christian Cox is a Knoxville-based artist and designer who has recently branched out into performance. His first set this year found a roomful of eager Royal Bangs fans running the anti-comedy gauntlet of hack standup “Garry Plimpton,” to the bemusement ...

Andrew Skurka has logged 30,000 miles of long-distance hiking and has refined walking in the woods to a science. Now he has distilled his hard-earned outdoor skills and insight into the recently published book The Ultimate Hiker’s Gear Guide (National ...

Steven Wright first rose to prominence in the 1980s as a kind of anti-comedian; his deadpan style, unruly haircut, and absurdist observational one-liners were completely unlike any other comedy at the time. Wright has only released two albums during his ...

Christopher Hebert may be best known around Knoxville as a professor of English at the University of Tennessee, but all of that is about to change with the publication of his first book, The Boiling Season (Harper).

Weil’s protagonists are really alone—so alone it hurts. Touches of a modern Southern Gothic pop up now and again, which is probably why Weil has been compared to Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy. But his novellas aren’t about violence, they’re ...

Keltie Ferris got her MFA in painting at Yale, and already has pieces in the collection of the Saatchi Gallery in London and the Kemper Museum in Kansas City.

University of Tennessee history professor and MacArthur Fellow Jay Rubenstein’s new book, Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse, is a detailed account of the First Crusade and an analysis of the religious and political conditions ...

Terrance Hayes is cooler than you. It’s not just because he won the National Book Award last year for his collection Lighthead. It’s not even because Hayes is that rarest of the rare, a poet who doesn’t toil away in ...

A producer of Queer as Folk on Showtime, author and director of the Sordid Lives play, film, and television series, and passionate civil rights activist, Del Shores is touring with his second stand-up routine, Del Shores: Sordid Confessions. Knoxville and ...

Patricia C. McKissak was an educator and editor before turning her talents to writing children’s books in the late 1980s. Her work, much of it written in collaboration with her husband Frederick, focuses on African-American history and folklore, and has ...

HBO's True Blood, which enters its fourth season this summer, is based on Harris’ series of novels that imagine a world in which vampires have metaphorically come out of the dark after the advent of commercial synthetic blood sales.

Jeffrey Saad has one of those jobs that we all fantasize about. As host of the Cooking Channel’s United Tastes of America—produced by upstart Knoxville television studio Lusid Media—he gets to travel the country and eat both the best versions ...

Paula Kerger sounds way too nice to be a CEO. She also sounds remarkably calm for someone who, as we spoke, was facing losing a major source of funding to her organization—the U.S. House last week voted to withhold all ...

It’s unlikely that Margo Pelletier could have predicted her trajectory from struggling artist to political prisoner to documentary filmmaker when she first moved to Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood in the late 1970s, but the social injustice she witnessed there awakened ...

If you know even just a little bit about the publishing industry, then you know what malarkey book jacket blurbs are. But Owen King’s blurb on the back of Kevin Wilson’s 2009 book, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth ...