WNBA Nashville ChapterConnecting the Book Community
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Just go to our Join page and complete the membership form. Then, after you click submit, click on the pay button to pay with your card via Square. If you have any questions, please email us at wnbanashwebsite@gmail.com. Thank you for joining us!
WNBA Holds 2023 National Board Meeting in Boston
by Kathleen Dietz, Nashville President Chapter presidents from Los Angeles, San Francisco, New Orleans, South Florida, Boston, New York, Nashville and Washington, DC met in Boston from June 2-4. It was unusual weather for Boston in June. Temperatures were in the 40s with gray skies and misting rain. Despite the weather, flowers were in full bloom and the city was vibrant. There is so much to share with you; however, I’ll keep it brief for now. Keep an eye out for an email with more details. The 2023 WNBA Award Reception was held at Porter Square Books in Boston. The 2023 WNBA Award was presented to Eve Bridburg, founder and executive director of GrubStreet. The leading creative writing center | GrubStreet In recognition of her founding of GrubStreet, a non-academic creative writing center; For her fostering its growth to become a cultural crossroads for writers in the Boston area; For overseeing its expansion to enfold writers and instructors of all ages, ethnicities, and genders; For building and sustaining what has become a nationwide model for writing communities. The event included a panel of three authors from the writing and literary community in Boston; Serina Gousby, program manager, Boston Writers of Color; Namrata Patel, novelist; Diana Norman Szokolyai, co-founder, Cambridge Writers Workshop. WNBA's Great Group Reads is managed by Kristin Knox from the Charlotte chapter She will need new readers for the 2024 GGR season. If interested, please let us know and we will provide more details about the program. Sign up for new readers will be January and February 2024. What are the chapter presidents reading? Remarkably Bright Creatures, Shelby Van Pelt Fly Girl, Ann Hood Inside the Second Wave of Feminism, Nancy Rosenstock Trust, Hernan Diaz Code Girls: Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II, Liz Mundy 
If you can't go to Arizona for the Tucson Festival of Books in the spring, you might be able to make it to Bowling Green, KY! Kayla Stierwalt recently attended the SOKY Book Fest, an annual event held in March or April each year. Held at the Knicely Conference Center on Nashville Rd., it's almost just up the street! Here's Kayla's report.
by Kayla Stierwalt, Bowling Green correspondent Bestselling author Sharon Cameron guided writers through making a working skeleton of a story idea using W questions. I thought through a concept I had in mind before slipping out for my own creative writing class. It felt good to participate in a workshop that had a similar structure and takeaways as my own sessions. As Sharon emphasized, this approach prevents a novel from languishing in its current draft. I later had the opportunity to chat with Sharon Cameron, and she was as engaging as a person as she was as a workshop teacher and author. We smiled through a discussion about the variety of styles she writes, and my heart sighed when she said her husband helped with engineering type details as I recalled a conversation earlier that week with a writer-teacher friend whose husband is an engineer (Mark Watney is still my engineer boyfriend stand in). I thanked her for the workshop, and she wanted to know if I found it helpful. This gave me an opportunity to return the affirmation of a helpful session that she gave me, and I shared how I enjoyed the space to revisit an idea I had let languish and how her approach validated my teaching. We both seemed happy for the confidence boost, and I appreciated the nudge to share how my story unfolds. 
Board Retreat Scheduled for JulyYour Nashville board members will be attending their annual retreat on Saturday, July 22 at the Southeast Branch of NPL. They will be planning events and opportunities for our membership for 2023-24. If you have any ideas or concerns, let us know. Contact information and board members are listed here. Annual Garden PartyWNBA Nashville members had a great evening of fun, food, and fellowship on Thursday, May 11. Barbie Chadwick was gracious to open up her home once again on what promised to be a rainy day. But Barbie said it wouldn't rain, and it didn't!
The garden party is always a favorite event because it gives us a chance to socialize and really get to know one another. We were especially glad to have five new members with us for this party. And we very much missed those who couldn't join us that day. Member News Don't forget to check out our Member News page regularly. Our members are doing great things and have great tips for you! If you have anything you would like to add, complete our contact form. Member news can be about anything that you want to share, your retirement, a promotion at work, your latest publication, your appearances, or a work in progress. News of current members only will be published. Our members are awesome! |
Literary Society! Thursday, June 15 Join us for some great ideas about what to read next! Go to our contact page to let us know if you have any questions or want the link. We meet on Zoom at 7:00 p.m. There are more details below. 
Join us at https://www.greenhousenash.com. Order a beverage—or a meal—then chat about books and the arts from 5:30-7:30 pm.
June 1 -- “What Powerful Nonfiction Have You Read Lately? July 6 -- "From Book to Screenplay: Which Version Was Better?" August 3 -- "Beach Reads: Novels as Leisure" Literary Discoveries in PortugalWhile on a recent trip to Portugal, Genetta Adair visited the magnificent Biblioteca Joanina (Joanine Library, in English). This Baroque library was completed in 1728 and is considered one of the most beautiful in Europe. Built above an academic prison at the University of Coimbra, it functioned as the university library until the mid-1990s.
Named for Portuguese King João V (King John V, in English), this literary treasure contains 60,000 volumes dating from the 14th to the 18th centuries, including a 15th century manuscript of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri and Hebrew texts hidden during the Portuguese Inquisition. The floor above the academic prison operated as a book deposit for the Noble Floor. This second floor was used to clean, catalogue, and preserve the ancient books. The richly decorated Noble Floor features exotic carvings and painted ceilings above two stories of gilded balustrades and shelves constructed with wood from the tropics. To protect the leather-bound books from bugs, a colony of bats live in the library, eating insects every night. In keeping with literary discoveries, Genetta found a free little library with contemporary books in both English and Portuguese just down the hall from her room at the Hotel Avenida Palace in Lisbon. Taking a trip this summer? Doing anything bookish? While you're out and about, take a picture of yourself in a library or bookstore or in a literary location and share it with your book friends by sending it to me to post on our website. Just email it to wnbanashwebsite@gmail.com. Thanks!
July 15, 2023 10:00 am Book Discussion 
In 1970s Baltimore, fourteen-year-old Mary Jane loves cooking with her mother, singing in her church choir, and enjoying her family’s subscription to the Broadway Show Tunes of the Month record club. Shy, quiet, and bookish, she’s glad when she lands a summer job as a nanny for the daughter of a local doctor. A respectable job, Mary Jane’s mother says. In a respectable house.
All book discussions are currently being held on Zoom.
Click here to see our Upcoming Book Discussions July 15 September 16 Next Literary Society: June 15 at 7:00pm Join us for some conversation!Would you like to have a chance to socialize with your fellow members of WNBA without leaving home or having to fight Nashville traffic? At 7:00 pm on the third Thursday of February, April, June, August, October, and December, you can do just that! That is when we have our Literary Society meetings where we share books that we've been reading. But we also talk about life and get to know each other a little bit better. Join us for some online fellowship! You should receive an email with the Zoom link early in the week, but if you don't, let us know through the contact form on this site and we will send it to you. Our next Literary Society meeting is June 15 at 7:00 p.m. "I look forward to hearing everyone talk enthusiastically about the books they're reading, and what they most enjoyed. It's always a nice variety. My "books to read" list has grown every time we chat over Zoom." -- Tori Ross Many Thanks
WNBA Nashville wants to say thank you to Marjorie Kaup Haines for serving as our membership chair for 2022-23. She has had to step down, so we also thank Catherine Hooper for stepping up to serve for 2023-24.
Our organization is totally run by volunteers, and we owe our thanks to all of the board members and those who support us and our activities. We're looking forward to another great year of programs and friendship! WNBA Loves Books! We write them, we publish them, we sell them, we teach children and adults to read and appreciate them, we loan them, we borrow them, we give them, we read them, we listen to them, and we share them with friends. --Lee Fairbend Check out WNBA's national website to find out what is going on around the country in all of our chapters. Women's National Book Association (WNBA) - WNBA-Books |
About the Nashville Chapter
Since 1955, the Nashville chapter of the Women’s National Book Association has been promoting reading, supporting literacy, and advancing the role of women in the community of the book. We offer informative programs and networking opportunities from September through May, a book discussion group that meets six times a year, and various charitable and outreach activities
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Questions?
All events, with the exception of the annual Christmas dinner and the Garden Party, are free and open to the public. For more information, or to request a Zoom code, contact wnbanashwebsite@gmail.com