Tag: Zandria Robinson

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News News Feature

Memphis Literary Arts Festival Launches

CREDIT: DBW Photography

If the prevailing stereotype of the

writer/reader is of a solitary individual, slaving away with bleary eyes, then the Center for Southern Literary Arts (CSLA) aims to challenge the traditional narrative. Because stories are inherently a means of communication and of reinforcing our connections — with each other, with the past, and with our cultures. To illustrate the communal aspect and intersectional nature of storytelling, in its many forms and genres, the CSLA is unveiling the inaugural Memphis Literary Arts Festival (MLAF) this Saturday, June 16th, in the Edge district.

“We founded the organization a little less than a year ago,” says Jamey Hatley, co-founder and creative director of the CSLA. In its not-quite-a-year in existence, along with planning the debut of the MLAF, the center has already brought some impressively mighty literary talent to Memphis. Last February, the nonprofit brought Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage, to the Orpheum for a reading and conversation with Hatley, who is a writer in her own right. “That event was the launch of our Main Stage series,” says Molly Quinn, co-founder and executive director of CSLA and a veteran of similar nonprofit literature festivals in New York and L.A. “We did two of those this year, and next year you’ll see somewhere between four and six.”

When Hatley and Quinn founded the CSLA (with co-founder/writer Zandria Robinson), Memphis did not seem quite as hospitable a place for practitioners of the literary arts. “When I was a young writer, I didn’t travel. My parents didn’t have a lot of money, and I traveled and experienced the world through books. We were at a point in Memphis where we weren’t sure if our big independent [bookstore] was going to stick around, the [Mid-South Book Festival] had stopped,” Hatley elaborates. “So I came back to Memphis into a situation that was more in peril than how I left it. As a working artist, that was very scary to me.” So, mindful of the importance of a space given over to the mingling of voices and ideas, Hatley, Quinn, and Robinson pulled together to create the CSLA.

DBW Photography

(l to r) Zandria Robinson, Jamey Hatley, and Molly Rose Quinn

MLAF is about connections, about creating new ones, and about celebrating existing connections that may go overlooked. “A lot of people might think that they have to go to New York to find mentors and people to inspire them, but we want people to know that that inspiration is right here in Memphis,” Hatley says. Hatley, a native Memphian whose work has appeared in the Oxford American, Callalloo, and the acclaimed Memphis Noir collection, knows the value of a space for writers to connect. She remembers waiting in a line at the now twice-rebranded Davis-Kidd bookstore to meet Crystal Wilkinson, an author with whom Hatley developed a friendship. Wilkinson will be in conversation with Hatley at MLAF, closing a circle that began when Hatley was a “baby writer … in the back of the line waiting to try to figure out something to say to the famous writer.”

Wilkinson will be just some of the talent on display at the MLAF. The festival is remarkable in its inclusion of different forms of storytelling. The lineup for the one-day festival includes Courtney Alexander, who made a tarot deck that engages with ideas about body image and archetypes, and Daniel Jose Older, a musician and author of a series of young-adult ghost noir books. There will also be journalists, muralists, musicians, and novelists. “We thought really hard about what kind of overlap and what kind of interdisciplinary spirit this lineup would have,” Quinn says. “In part because we believe that mixing those things together allows for the kind of accessibility Jamey is talking about.”

It’s fitting in Memphis, a city where some of the most illustrative storytellers haven’t even been literate, that accessibility is among the primary goals of the festival. Hatley explains that, with this goal in mind, they’re striving to marry the entertaining and the enriching, the highbrow and the whimsical. “We want to say that literature is the ‘then’ and the ‘now,’ and we want to make a bridge across to those communities,” Hatley says. “Voices need to be heard, and whatever route they can take, we want people to know all the ways. We want people’s voices to get out in a way that feels empowering for them.”

Memphis Literary Arts Festival is Saturday, June 16th, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Marshall Avenue between South Orleans and Monroe Extd.

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Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

Tunde Wey’s 44: A Table for Forty-Four at Iris

CREDIT: Moyo Oyelola

despite the popular sentiment, we’re not currently living in a unique moment in race relations in america, but rather a prolonged moment that started with america’s founding and stretches to now. let us not mistake the evolution of racism, from overt bigotry to covert dispossession, as progress. instead let us examine the myriad ways it manifests in contemporary life. to complete a tragic full circle, even that veneer of cordiality has been scratched off as shown by police shootings, white supremacy marches, muslim bans, anti-immigration legislation … join us in memphis for a day of food and honest conversations about where and who we are. — fromlagos.com

Moyo Oyelola

Tunde Wey

Tunde Wey is a Nigerian-born chef who’d been traveling the country putting on pop-up restaurants for a few years when, inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, he sharpened his focus. At his Blackness in America dinners, frank discussions about race were on the menu.

On October 9th, Wey will bring 4: A Table for Four and 44: A Table for Forty-four to Memphis. Wey is teaming up with Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA) director John T. Edge, Rhodes professor Zandria Robinson, and chef Kelly English. The event, held by happenstance on Columbus Day, will be at Restaurant Iris.

The “4” and “44” in the title of the event are a nod to Jay Z’s 4:44 album.

“I’ve just been listening a lot of rap, and the Jay Z album has been one of my favorites,” says Wey. “The themes that he strikes are very relevant to discuss, whether you agree with them or not. Even in disagreement, we can create a rigorous examination on what it means to be black and also what it means to be white.”

The event will begin with four lunches for four from noon to 4 p.m. The cost is $44.

“The idea is that four people come together and we’re going to be eating and there’s going to be conversation,” Wey says. “We’ll be talking to them and serving them food and we’ll be listening to them, what it is they are saying and thinking about.”

The plan is to focus on four ingredients from Western Africa and the South. Wey would like all the dishes to be black. What he envisions is a black bean bisque, plantain gnocchi and catfish with black garlic, a cassava pudding …

Later, starting at 6 p.m., there will be a dinner for 44. There will be readings by Wey, Robinson, and Edge. There will be West African lullabies and Southern spirituals. Robinson will serve as curator for the discussion, using Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s Racism Without Racists as a guide.

“The overall theme is structural racism, which is one of the themes Jay-Z touches on in the album,” Robinson says. “But the album is more of a jumping off point to push and challenge and broaden the scope of that conversation by telling a history of racism and resistance across these four tables. The dinner is the evening reckoning with that history.”

Wey will already be in the area for SFA’s annual symposium. Wey and Edge have a history. Wey called for Edge to be fired for appropriating black Southern food for his own good. He and Edge now consider each other colleagues, according to Wey, and it was Edge who suggested Memphis and Restaurant Iris for Wey’s next project.

This year’s symposium will focus on ethnicity and identity. The 4 dinner serves as an extension of the symposium, of sorts.

“Memphis has long been a site of of contention and resistance,” Edge says. “A Columbus Day dinner, convented by Tunde, contributes beautifully to that ongoing narrative.

“Restaurants — not diners, not cafes, not lunch counters — have long been place of comfort, bunkers where diners have come to escape discord,” Edge says. What happens when restaurants, if only for the night, become places where discourse and discord are intentional?”

Wey says he lets the time and place set the tone at each of the dinners he hosts. And, yes, sometimes the conversations get intense.

“The idea isn’t to make people feel uncomfortable. It’s just part of the process,” Wey says. “You don’t go to the gym to feel pain. You got to the gym to work out and if you work out, well, you know, you’ll feel sore.

“I let it be what it’s going to be. Just like real life, there’s some contentiousness, some laughter. It’s honest and cordial in a way, but still very forthright.”

To buy tickets or for more information, go to fromlagos.com.

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Book Features Books

The Center for Southern Literary Arts’ grand vision.

CREDIT: Ron Lima | Dreamstime

Last December in this space, I wrote out my Christmas list with a one-item wish: that a single nonprofit would come to the forefront and champion the local literary community. In the same way that the visual arts, live music, indie films, and theater have their advocates, so should the writer and reader.

I recently found my stocking stuffed. It wasn’t any jolly old elf slipping down the chimney, but a simple tweet: “Last Dec, @richardalley wrote in @MemphisFlyer wishing for ‘a single organization to gather these folks up and give them a home.’ So we did.”

That message was tweeted out by Molly Rose Quinn, and the “we” she mentions includes writers Jamey Hatley and Zandria Robinson. The trio have established the Center for Southern Literary Arts (CSLA) and, while still in the planning stages, those plans are bold and visionary. The mission states the CSLA “aims to cultivate the rich and diverse stories of the Memphis region by encouraging innovation in the literary arts and their adjacent economies.”

The CSLA seeks to draw writers out and into the community, bringing them together with readers to share their stories, regardless of publication credentials. “People tell stories in churches, in community organizations, at the gas station, and those stories are just as important,” says Hatley, the 2016 Prose Fellow for the National Endowment for the Arts and winner of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award that same year.

“It’s our collective response as friends and writers to the peril that we think the literary community is in here,” says Robinson, an urban sociologist and award-winning author. Rhodes College, where she’s an assistant professor of Sociology, was recently awarded a grant through the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and a portion will be put toward the CSLA’s startup.

The group was struck by the loss of the Booksellers at Laurelwood (that store will reopen soon as Novel) and with the changes at Literacy Mid-South, which, most notably, will see an indefinite hiatus of its three-year-old book festival. “At its core, it’s about returning Memphis to the literary map, reclaiming Memphis as a literary space, and making Memphis a place where professional writers can be trained up and developed and retained and thrive,” says Robinson.

The women are in the process of fund-raising with long-range goals of a permanent space for workshops, readings, and signings. Local programs — story booth and book festival, along with Christian Brothers University’s Memphis Reads initiative — tended to work as lone wolves, sometimes pulling in bookstores and the University of Memphis’ MFA writing program, but more often going it alone. The CSLA aims to stitch the community together.

“These programs that have run into obstacles or have folded, when they did exist, were so siloed, which is something we heard from so many people,” says Quinn, a native Memphian who has been in New York City the past 10 years working as a community organizer and arts administrator leading programs with literary and cultural institutions.

Though there is no physical space for the Center at the moment, there will be programming beginning with the next academic year: dinner with the arts, a multidisciplinary event featuring a chef, visual artist, and writer who discuss issues of the South; partnering with writers to facilitate workshops within a local high school; and a truncated version of their own take on the Mid-South Book Festival.

If this reader/writer could be granted one more wish, it would be for the CSLA to find a home within Crosstown Arts, at least temporarily as an incubator, while working its way through its prologue. The nonprofit that has seen the revitalization of the old Sears building is sorely lacking in literary event programming, and a partnership would be a means to an end for both organizations.

“We are geographically and strategically positioned to be a regional leader in the area,” Robinson says. “We’re looking to serve as an umbrella, collaborator, clearing house, friend, partner, supporter of other organizations with similar missions.”

Learn more about the Center for Southern Literary Arts at southernliteraryarts.org.