Tag: Literacy Mid-South

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News News Blog

Auntie Opal — Queen of the Tile — Turns 105

Photo: Courtesy Nicole Hughes

As she transitioned into independent living earlier this year, Minnie Opal Hill — or Auntie Opal, as her family calls her — made sure to bring her Scrabble board and her Scrabble dictionary with her. At 105, she’s been playing the game for decades, knows all the rules, and has memorized the points for all the tiles. She’s quite the expert, so it was only natural that her 105th birthday party be Scrabble-themed.

The party in late July was decked out with Scrabble-board tablecloths, a Scrabble-tile birthday banner, and a Scrabble-board cake, but the big surprise of the day was that Hasbro, owner of the popular game, was donating 105 board games to Literacy Mid-South in Hill’s name — and not just Scrabble, but different games for all ages.

“We are big on family literacy and we support the creative ways that parents involve their children in literacy-rich activities,” Sam O’Bryant, executive director of Literacy Mid-South, said in a release about the donation. “We know that families will spend several hours playing these games, strengthening their children’s reading proficiency as a result.”

Nicole Hughes, Hill’s great-niece, knew that this donation from Hasbro would be the perfect gift for her great-aunt whose greatest passions are books, Wheel of Fortune, and Scrabble — basically anything with words, she says. “That’s kind of what has kept her mind so sharp. She’s so independent, and she has so much energy. When people meet her, they’re like, ‘Are you sure she’s not in her eighties?’” 

Photo: Courtesy Nicole Hughes

Hughes has planned Hill’s birthday parties for the past five years. “When she turned 100, I was like, ‘As our first centenarian in the family, we got to go all out,’” says Hughes. “She was the Peabody Duck Master for the day, and it was just a lot of fun. … I reached out to the mayor’s office, and they sent her a lovely declaration, declaring it Opal Hill Day.”

For Hill’s 103rd birthday, the family hosted a book drive with Novel for Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital, in keeping with her love for reading and giving back. Novel even created a special display with her favorite mystery books. For this birthday, in addition to donating games to Literacy Mid-South, Hasbro gave Hill a special-edition Scrabble board as a bonus birthday treat.

“Opal’s very humble in her own life,” says Hughes, “so I think I have, through these birthday celebrations, created more of a fuss than maybe she’s used to, but I’m like, ‘You’re worth it.’ She’s given back to the community [throughout her life], but I don’t think she has thought to give back in ways we have through these birthday celebrations. It’s more of a gift for her — for her to see what kind of impact you can make with your story.”

At this, Hughes recalls Hill’s experience as the Peabody Duck Master for her 100th birthday. “At the end of the little ceremony,” Hughes says, “she was sitting there, and there was a line of kids that lined up just to meet a 100 year old. It was the cutest thing, but it was the first time we were seeing what kind of impact it can have. Yes, it’s amazing to meet someone of that age, but it’s also amazing to hear their stories. 

“I just think we have a lot to learn from centenarians especially,” Hughes continues. “Memphis has other centenarians. Opal’s not the only one. They hold so many stories — a century of stories — and the city is only a little over 200 years old itself.”

East Tennessee has a Century Club, which honors individuals 100 years and older, with members of the club receiving a letter of greetings from the governor and a matted certificate of recognition from the Century Club. They also receive cards during birthdays and holidays. Hughes’ dream at the moment is for West Tennessee to create a similar club. “I wish we could celebrate all centenarians in Memphis [the way we’ve celebrated Opal],” she says.

To learn more about Literacy Mid-South, how you can donate, and how you can get involved, visit literacymidsouth.org.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Indie Memphis Names Knox Shelton New Executive Director

Knox Shelton

Indie Memphis has tapped Knox Shelton as its next executive director.

The new leadership hire comes after the resignation of Ryan Watt, who led the arts organization through a period of unprecedented expansion, and the challenges of the COVID era.

Shelton comes to Indie Memphis after a stint as executive director of Literacy Mid-South. 

“I am honored and thrilled with the opportunity to lead Indie Memphis. The organization has made tremendous strides over the past several years and has an incredibly optimistic future. I look forward to combining years of working alongside the Memphis community with my passion for film as we continue to anchor Memphis as a thriving artistic environment for film and production,” he says.

Board president Brett Robbs, who led the five-month search for a new director, praised Shelton’s experience in the Memphis nonprofit community.

“Thanks to his inclusive vision and values, Knox will help us continue to support a range of filmmakers and present an ever greater variety of films that reflect our own community’s many different stories, interests, and experiences.”

The organization now called Indie Memphis was founded in 1998 as a film festival to present Memphis filmmakers’ works to the world. It has grown over the last 23 years to include year-round programming, and before the pandemic was scheduled open its own cinema in partnership with Malco’s Studio on the Square.

Shelton will face the considerable challenge of leading the festival in the chaotic, post-pandemic film industry. In 2019, the festival attracted its largest audience yet, selling more than 12,000 tickets and passes. The 2020 festival adopted a pandemic-safe, online, and in-person model which attracted audiences from as far away as Brazil and Israel.

Artistic director Miriam Bale says she expects the festival’s push towards including more diverse voices in independent and art cinema to continue with Shelton at the helm.

“We are thrilled to be working with someone who feels as passionately as we do about the importance of storytelling and education,” said Bale. “With Knox, we’re confident there will be no lag, but a seamless continuation of the work we have done and exponential growth towards where we would like to be.”

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

The Power of the People

While you and your family were enjoying the Thanksgiving weekend, hundreds of people wrongly spent the holiday at Shelby County jail, literally lost in the system, due to a new, malfunctioning computer records program.

Just City, a Memphis nonprofit group concerned with improving our criminal justice system, filed suit against Sheriff Bill Oldham on behalf of an inmate who spent 11 days in jail after being picked up on a traffic stop. The inmate was not informed of the charges against him, and it took nearly two weeks to get him out.

Many other inmates were kept in jail unlawfully, even after they’d posted bail, due to failures in the new system. Without Just City’s efforts to shine a light on the problem, most of us would never have known about it.

And while most of us were enjoying an evening out or a night at home watching the Grizzlies last week, a couple dozen citizens met at the Abe Goodman Clubhouse in Overton Park to discuss ways to fight the Tennessee Valley Authority’s plans to drill wells in our pristine Memphis Sand aquifer. TVA’s original plans called for using wastewater to cool its new plant. The change of plans to instead tap our aquifer for that purpose were made without public input. Without the Sierra Club raising the alarm, most of us would have never known of the problem, and TVA would have quietly drilled wells into our fresh water.

These are just two examples that demonstrate the power that can be wielded by activist, concerned citizens. Another, of course, was the Save the Greensward movement, which, after a prolonged battle, ultimately resolved the long-festering issue of Memphis Zoo parking on public parkland.

I could list dozens more examples of citizen involvement in tackling the many issues we face — endemic poverty, lack of legal representation, animal services, public transportation (see this week’s cover story), literacy, women’s rights, education. You name the issue, and there is probably a group of concerned citizens working to improve the situation.

We owe them all our thanks. These are folks who recognize that change — real change — only comes from a commitment to volunteer one’s time, effort, and money. Governments, at any level, can only do so much. And it looks like for the next few years our state and federal governments are going to be run by folks who don’t believe government can do much of anything, except cut taxes and privatize government services to siphon taxpayer money to corporate interests.

And to make it worse, we have a president-elect who appears to spend most of his spare time watching television and reacting to it on Twitter. In the past few days, he’s spent every spare moment criticizing the media, insulting individual reporters, and baselessly claiming that millions of votes were cast illegally. And this is the man who won the election.

At some point, the grownups in the GOP are going to have to acknowledge that a horrible mistake has been made. We’ve elected a man who bypasses daily intelligence briefings but doesn’t miss a night (or morning) of CNN or Fox News, a man whose byzantine world-wide business connections will present daily conflict-of-interest potential, and a man whose mental stability is clearly questionable.

Though I truly hope I’m wrong, I fear we are in for a chaotic near future. Which is why organizations like Just City, the Sierra Club, MIFA, Mid-South Food Bank, Habitat for Humanity, Literacy Mid-South, and countless others I could name are more important now than ever before. An involved, organized citizenry can mobilize more quickly to speak truth to power and stand up to injustice and government overreach.

I believe power will need to be spoken to — loudly and vociferously — in the year to come. Stay woke.

Categories
Book Features Books

Mid-South Book Festival gathers book lovers and writers.

It’s that time of year again, book lovers. Time to climb off the sofa, turn off your reading lamp, put down your cheaters, and slip from the cozy warmth of your favorite coffee shop. But don’t leave your books behind. Bring them with you to the Mid-South Book Festival.

This year’s festival takes place over five days beginning Wednesday, September 7th and should be every bit as exciting as last year’s, an affair that saw 80 authors and nearly 5,000 attendees. It was a great showing for an event in only its second year of existence.

For this, its third year, there are close to 100 authors and speakers, including Phyllis Dixon (Down Home Blues), book editor George Hodgman, Joshua Hood (Warning Order), and Ed Tarkington (Only Love Can Break Your Heart). Sure to attract a large audience is Lauren Groff, author of the wildly popular novel Fates and Furies, a finalist for the National Book Award and Amazon’s pick for Best Book of the Year. She’ll be in conversation with author and festival chair Courtney Miller Santo Saturday at 2:30 p.m. on the main stage at Playhouse on the Square.

Lauren Groff

In addition to Groff, one of the panels Santo is most excited about is Making Memphis, which includes writers with a local connection who work in the genres of poetry, nonfiction, thrillers, and speculative fiction. “One of the themes the committee and I talked about was really being more inclusive in the types of writers and genre of writers that are coming, and acknowledging that people read for all kinds of reasons and it’d be best to really be broad in bringing people in,” Santo said. “We have one of the premier editors of science fiction, Sheree Thomas. We have a couple of poets on the panel as well as Josh Hood, who writes military thrillers. I’m always saying that Memphis is a storyteller’s town. I’m very excited to see people come together and talk about storytelling.”

Saturday is full of panel discussions at Playhouse on the Square and across the street at Circuit Playhouse. These include: The Word (Memphis’ longest-running open mic event that features a live band), Echoes of History (three writers discuss their stories of war and why they wrote them), Crowd Control (influential bloggers discuss how to stand out among the online crowd), and Impossible Language (selections from the ongoing poetry reading series), among many others.

Prior to Saturday, Literacy Summit 2016 will be held on Wednesday, September 7th. Literacy Mid-South is in the business of improving people’s lives through improving literacy rates, and the summit brings together “nonprofit and government agencies, community advocates, volunteers, and parents to network, develop new skills, and share promising practices.” The featured speaker will be Yolie Flores with the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading. There is a $10 registration fee for this event.

Friday night, in the Event Room at Playhouse, will be Words Matter, a collaboration that begins with a literary contribution from a writer before a team of artists and performers molds those words into their own creation. Visual artists, musicians, dancers, actors, and filmmakers express their creativity through the author’s language. Tickets for this event are $25 in advance and $40 at the door.

Sunday sees the inaugural Student Writers Conference, meant to help young writers age 12 to 17 grow and succeed in their craft. Registration fee is $10 with scholarships available as needed.

This year’s festivities promise to outshine those before it, and the future of the festival is bright. Santo talks of spinning it into its own nonprofit and hosting an even greater diversity of presenters and attendees. “We’d like to keep it open and inclusive, and we’re talking to our community about what it’s needing,” she said. “My craving with being an author is to have good stories to tell, and that’s the center of the Mid-South and Memphis for me — the idea of storytelling.”

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Book Features Books

Literacy Mid-south Holds Flash Mob

CREDIT: Richard J. Alley

With hundreds of people gathered on the Greensward at Overton Park last Saturday, it was difficult to tell how many were there solely for the fourth-annual Literacy Mid-South Reading Flash Mob. Yet mixed in with the Frisbee throwers, the sun worshippers, the pet owners, and protesters was a healthy gathering of book lovers.

“Originally we came up with this idea when the flash mobs were really big,” Kevin Dean, executive director of Literacy Mid-South, says. “There was a reading sit-in elsewhere as a protest, and I thought, ‘Well why not just do some shared reading experience for people?’ So we got in touch with the Overton Park Conservancy and got the permit, and it’s just the perfect place for people to come and read. People are always out here reading anyway, so it’s just capitalizing on what’s happening here already.”

Literacy Mid-South was set up in the southwest corner of the lawn with a tent and tables full of books for children and adults free for the taking. On the northern end, a steel-fence barricade was erected to keep protesters and zoo parking separated. Uniformed police stood in clusters on the far side of the fence in that dog-eared, wheel-rutted corner as one of their helicopters kept watch from the sky.

A rugby match took place nearby, women hula-hooped, artists sketched, and musicians played drums and guitars. None of this was a distraction, though, for readers such as Allison Renner and her family. “We support Literacy Mid-South, and I’m getting my master’s in library science,” she says. “I’m very interested in promoting reading, so we try to help out however we can.”

In the fight against zoo parking on the Greensward, it has been questioned again and again on social media and in print how those who care can’t seem to care about any of the larger issues facing Memphis. Bruce VanWyngarden wrote in his letter from the editor in the last issue of the Flyer, “Well, of course, there are bigger issues. Lots of them: poverty, illiteracy, crime, rampant obesity, income inequality, to name a few.”

Illiteracy is one link in the steel-fence barricade preventing people from improving themselves and society from rising out of the mire of poverty and crime and income inequality. According to Literacy Mid-South, 14 percent of Shelby County adults are at the most basic literacy level, while 22 percent function at a marginally higher level. Eighty-five percent of the adults who contact the organization for help read on a fourth-grade level. This makes it difficult for them to fill out job applications and to find a place in the workforce, leading to higher rates of poverty and crime. This is why the public display of reading is necessary and why offering free reading material, especially to children, is paramount.

To that end, Citizens to Protect Overton Park (CPOP) announced on Saturday that it would donate 100 books to Literacy Mid-South. That book, of course, is Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax, with its cautionary tale of what happens when nature is taken for granted.

From where I sat among the readers last Saturday, three issues were being battled simultaneously — obesity, as people ran and walked and jumped; illiteracy, as families gathered for the Reading Flash Mob; and the Greensward issue, as citizens peacefully protested the parking of cars on the city’s lawn. There was even a group collecting canned goods for the Mid-South Food Bank in an event called “Feed the Need and Save the Greensward.” So go ahead and add hunger to that list of Memphis problems being battled on the front lines of Overton Park.

We’ve made great strides in the past decade to come together and champion Memphis with a collective voice. Let’s keep that momentum going and tear down the walls that continue to hold us back as a city.

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We Recommend We Recommend

Mid-South Book Festival

“Everything is going so according to plan that it’s unsettling,” says Kevin Dean, executive director of Literacy Mid-South, the local agency that’s been working hard on the first-ever Mid-South Book Festival. Beginning this Thursday at Crosstown Arts and continuing into Sunday, events will also be held at the Memphis Botanic Garden, Burke’s Book Store, the Booksellers at Laurelwood, and the Memphis Gay and Lesbian Community Center.

The Mid-South Book Festival has dozens of writers scheduled and more than 50 free events planned, including panel discussions, author presentations, author readings, book signings, writing seminars, and sessions for aspiring writers, plus events designed especially for kids. It’s a festival, Dean says, whose time has come:

“The simple truth is that Memphis has needed not only a book festival but an ongoing sense of community for writers, book lovers, bloggers, and lifelong learners. The only way to make an event like this happen is to have support from the community. Without our committee, our sponsors, the volunteers, and the authors, we could never have possibly put this on. The support has been fantastic.”

Sept. 25th -28th

So, everything is set. The authors are ready. And according to Dean, who was contacted last week about final preparations, the tasks ahead were simple: printing programs, updating the schedule, etc. — in his words, “minor stuff.”

But it’s not too early to be thinking ahead. Asked if there were plans in the works for next year’s festival, Dean was already enthusiastic:

“YES! I’m so excited, but I can’t tell you about it yet. We’ll announce the location for the 2015 Mid-South Book Festival the week after this year’s festival. We’ve already signed the contract for the location. And it’s going to be awesome.”

Categories
Book Features Books

Mid-South Book Festival Booked For September

This may be the first week of July, but the last weekend of September is on the minds of the folks at Literacy Mid-South. That’s because planning is very much in the works (and has been for months now) for the organization’s first-ever, citywide, and mostly free Mid-South Book Festival September 25th-28th. Dozens of authors, panelists, speakers, and workshop leaders — the majority of them Memphians or Mid-Southerners — are set to appear. Multiple venues have agreed to serve as event sites, and sponsors are in place. So too festival apps, a Facebook page, and a Twitter account.

For a list of participating writers, events, venues, and updates, go to midsouthbookfest.org. Among the invited writers are Memphis Flyer Associate Editor (and cookbook author) Bianca Phillips and Flyer photographer Justin Fox Burks (cookbook co-author along with his wife, Amy Lawrence). Other Memphians slated to be on hand: Steve Bradshaw, Jennifer Chandler, Heather Dobbins, Robert Gordon, Aram Goudsouzian, Mark Greaney, Lisa Hickman, Corey Mesler, Lisa Patton, Courtney Miller Santo, and Barry Wolverton. But there are out-of-towners scheduled to appear too, among them: Julia Reed, Scott Heim, and Michael Lowenthal.

Dean, Heather Nordtvedt (Literacy Mid-South’s community relations manager), and the organization’s staff have been working hard since the idea for a book festival was raised at a board meeting last summer.

“Nobody thought it was going to happen anytime soon,” Dean admitted. “The festival was simply in our five-year plan — a signature event, not just a fund-raiser. Then our fall reading campaign fell through for this year, so we thought we’d try out the book festival idea. It was going to be a small thing. We thought: Let’s try it and see how it goes. If it doesn’t work, we’ll get rid of it.”

And indeed, the festival began small: a one-day event at the Memphis Botanic Garden. It’s now expanded to four days — with programs for children and young adults and live-music components — and the venues so far include, in addition to the Botanic Garden, the Booksellers at Laurelwood, Burke’s Book Store, and the Memphis Gay & Lesbian Community Center.

What prompted the expansion? Immediate and enthusiastic local author interest, for one thing. Public response, for another. According to Dean, when the festival launched its Facebook page, the site received 250 “likes” the first day.

Early in the planning stages, Literacy Mid-South was thinking maybe a couple hundred people would show up for the festival. The organization is now expecting thousands. Which all goes to show, Dean is convinced, that Memphians have been looking for such a festival in their own town. Nashville has its Southern Festival of Books. Little Rock has its Arkansas Literary Festival.

It was at the festival in Little Rock this past April that Dean talked to author Mary Roach, who’s no stranger to the book-festival circuit. Dean told Roach of Literacy Mid-South’s plans. She immediately convinced him that the Mid-South Book Festival needed to expand beyond a single day and single venue — and the better to meet one of the festival’s goals: funding local literacy programs. Proceeds from Literacy Mid-South’s onsite Bookworm store, concessions, and three creative-writing workshops during the festival will go to supporting those programs.

“I’m a big proponent of growing things — starting small, then growing,” Dean said of the festival.

But growing this fast? Dean has just hired someone to manage the festival for the next couple of years. And there’s been talk about doing some publishing at Literacy Mid-South: a collection of writings by festival authors about Memphis.

“This all shows a need that we’re filling, even among people who don’t necessarily know what a book festival is,” Dean said of the Mid-South Book Festival. “And what’s crazy: We have all these best-selling authors in Memphis, and I didn’t even know they live here! Putting the festival together has been educational for me too.”

But as planning the festival reaches its final stages, Dean had this to add: “Everything’s nailed down. Now it just has to happen.”

midsouthbookfest.org; facebook.com/midsouthbookfest; @MSouthBookFest

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Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

Guess Where I’m Eating Contest 30

The contest is back … and the giveaway this week is a good one: 4 tickets to the annual martini-tastic Literacy Mid-South fund-raiser Literatini, being held Friday, June 13th at the Booksellers at Laurelwood.

Screen_Shot_2014-06-02_at_9.21.47_AM.png

The first person to correctly ID the dish and where I’m eating wins the tickets.

Among the restaurants offering up samples of their martinis at the event are Automatic Slim’s, Alchemy, South of Beale, Silly Goose, Blind Bear, Grove Grill, and Jim’s Place, with guests voting on their favorite two. There will also be a “Martini Death Match.” Last year’s Literatini sold out.

To enter, submit your answer to me via email at ellis@memphisflyer.com.

Answer and winner will be revealed in the next contest post.

The answer to contest 29 is the Wedding Cake Supreme at Jerry’s Sno Cones, and the winner is … Michael Donahoe.