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 ...

Pamela Uschuk is the University of Tennessee’s English Department’s visiting writer-in-residence this semester, but both she and her husband, William Pitt Root, are nationally renowned poets. Uschuk’s book Crazy Love won the American Book Award last year; Root was the ...

Noam Chomsky: "Some of the things the tea party is doing are exactly the right things, in my opinion. We should be organizing people to confront the real problems of society, and they are very severe. I think the tea ...

Alison Arngrim is best known for her role as Nellie Oleson, Laura Ingalls’ bratty nemesis on the ’70s family pioneer drama Little House on the Prairie. Arngrim’s new book, Confessions of a Prairie Bitch, is a poignant—and often hilarious—look back ...

Fifteen years of lucidity might sound like a career-ending proposition for a comedian best known for his nigh-incomprehensible standup act and his role as a twitchy gangleader-turned-cop in the Police Academy films, but Bobcat Goldthwait has parleyed sanity into a ...

William Mahaffey is a local filmmaker and movie buff who founded the Knoxville Horror Film Festival, which will celebrate its second year this weekend (and will also have a premiere screening of Mahaffey’s newest short, “Sick”). Mahaffey, a University of ...

Lisa Soland is a playwright who moved to Knoxville after beginning a successful career in Los Angeles. Her evening of short plays, Meet Cute, will premiere at Pellissippi State. Performances are October 15, 16, 22, 23 at 8pm and October ...

Marge Piercy has written 15 novels and 17 books of poetry—many of them concerned with feminism, politics, and Judaism—during her 50-year writing career. The 74-year-old Piercy will be in Knoxville this weekend for poetry readings at the University of Tennessee ...

Amy Greene’s nationally acclaimed first novel, Bloodroot, spans three generations in and around a small fictional East Tennessee hamlet called Millertown, a thinly veiled version of Morristown, where the 35-year-old Greene has lived all her life.

Raised in West Knoxville, Paul Harrill got some national attention in 2001 when his Knoxville-shot film, Gina, an Actress, Age 29 won the Jury Prize for short filmmaking at the Sundance Film Festival. Since then, he has made a second ...

Over the next couple of weeks, the Oak Ridge Playhouse is taking on Doubt, John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer- and Tony-winning play about suspicion, conflict, and repression in a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964. The play’s director, Tony Cedeño, ...

Head of DoubleJay Creative, which does high-tech PR and video work, Larsen Jay was once famous for spearheading Market Square’s holiday skating rink. But he turned motion-picture producer with last year’s release of That Evening Sun.

Libby Sherrill first decided to tackle a film about pit bulls as a grad student at the University of Tennessee. Three years later, her theme has been honed to reveal the perils of breed-specific legislation as carried out in three ...

George Barris and his brother Sam pretty much invented the business of customizing cars, back in 1940s Los Angeles. Nowadays, it’s an industry unto itself, as well as mass entertainment on all too many cable TV shows. But Barris still ...

Designer, voice actor, and producer C. Martin Croker knew quite a bit about the ’60s Hanna-Barbera cartoon Space Ghost. The show debuted when Croker was 4 years old, and it was one of the first shows he made a point ...