Yakich at Burke's: No. Due to a family emergency, poet Mark Yakich was unable to travel to Memphis for tonight's booksigning. Look for word from Burke's that the Yakich reading has been rescheduled.

The poet is Mark Yakich. He teaches at Loyola University in New Orleans. And he's answering the good people at Ploughshares magazine when asked: "Favorite recipe." Yakich's answer on the "pshares" blog: "The Moroccan Chicken Recipe We've Waited All Our Lives For." (In the same spirit and to the question "What's on your desk," Yakich answered: "A mess.")

Moroccan chicken. A mess. How about The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine? That's the title of Yakich's most recent book, from Penguin, of poems. (And that's Yakich in a self-portrait, left.)

Interested in hearing Yakich read? He's at Burke's Book Store on Friday, October 9th, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m.

So says Memphian Mark Greaney, and the quote comes from an interview on his website, markgreaneybooks.com.

So far, though, there's only one Mark Greaney book. It's a mass-market political thriller called The Gray Man (Jove), but Greaney's already sold the publisher on two sequels.

For a first-time author, this guy is getting a ton of attention. Why: Because The Gray Man is the real deal: a real page-turner. And Greaney's got a real character on his hands: a CIA operative turned assassin-for-hire named Court Gentry. Gentry's a target for intelligence outfits and paramilitary groups the world over, and yes, Gentry is used to carrying a gun on his person, but no, no need to advise him to do so.

How does it feel to be a new author on the brink of what's looking like the big time? Here's how:

Just announced: Richard Bausch, holder of the Moss Chair of Excellence in English at the University of Memphis, has won the 2009 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for fiction for his novel Peace (now in paperback, from Vintage). The honorarium: $10,000.

Bausch is winner along with author Benjamin Skinner for A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery. (The runners-up for this year's prize: Uwem Akpan's Say You're One of Them, named the next Oprah's Book Club selection, and Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution ... and How It Can Renew America.)

The Dayton Literary Peace Prize, launched in 2006, is awarded annually to works of fiction and nonfiction that use "the power of literature to foster peace, social justice, and global understanding." Peace is that: a meditation on the corrosive effects of violence among a group of American soldiers in World War II Italy.

In his statement on Dayton's website, Bausch said, "I am honored to receive the prize — especially when I see the books that were nominated along with mine. It is heartening to be judged worthy of that company, and to be singled out among them is deeply humbling."

Richard Bausch and the other winning authors will be recognized in an awards ceremony in Dayton, Ohio, on November 8th.

On Thursday, October 1st, Root will teach a master class at 2 p.m. in Patterson Hall; at 7 p.m., he'll be reading from and signing copies of his books in Mitchell Hall Auditorium.

Those books by Root include The Nonfictionist's Guide: On Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction and his latest, Following Isabella: Travels in Colorado Then and Now. In addition to writing, teaching, and regularly visiting creative-writing programs throughout the country, Root is an editor at the journal Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction.

Both of Root's appearances at the University of Memphis are free and open to the public. For more information, call 678-4692 or write creativewriting@memphis.edu.

On writer (and current Memphian) C. Bard Cole's latest book, the experimental This Is Where My Life Went Wrong (BLATT Books): a [Q]&A.

My friend in Memphis, Brian Pera ... I've known him since the late 1990s. I'd met him in New York City. We had the same editor at St. Martin's for our first books.

Brian was planning to start shooting his first movie, The Way I See Things. He had one position he could pay for and that he hadn't filled. It was boom operator. Brian said, "Do you want to work on my movie? You can forget about New Orleans for the month or so it'll take to shoot." I said okay. The cinematographer on that movie, Ryan Parker, trained me to operate the boom. I had a great time.

Then I went home to Maryland to figure out what I was going to do ... hoard some money. Tulane had canceled the semester. It had fired the instructors in my position ... first-year writing instructor. So I worked at a commercial greenhouse in Maryland.

Then Ryan helped me get a job at WKNO in Memphis, and that's where I've been ever since. I started as a production assistant doing all sorts of stuff — from manual labor to working on sets to learning about editing. Now I'm in promotions and the public information department.

There's another movie with Brian and Ryan coming up. I'm the production designer, and this time, we're trying to be a bit more "Hollywood." Ann Magnuson is gonna be one of our stars. I'm excited to meet her. When I was a little kid, well, not a little kid, a teenager, I used to look at Interview magazine and things I thought were cool, urban ... New York. Ann was there, right in there.

Over at Rhodes College, there's, so far, one visiting-author event slated, and it's Thursday, September 17th. That's when the college will host not one but three returning alumnae -- Christina LaPrease, Aisha Sharif, and Caki Wilkinson -- who will read from their poetry starting at 7:30 p.m. in Blount Auditorium inside Buckman Hall.

In case you don't recognize the name Wayne White, he grew up in the 1960s on the outskirts of Chattanooga, he studied art at Middle Tennessee State University, and he was in New York City when the downtown art scene there was heating up in the late '70s and early '80s. He was already an accomplished cartoonist and illustrator, and he was lucky enough to join the crew as an Emmy Award-winning puppeteer and set designer on Pee-wee's Playhouse. He also worked on music videos with Peter Gabriel ("Big Time") and Smashing Pumpkins ("Tonight, Tonight"). A painting of White's is a Lambchop album cover ("Nixon").

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• Drop the Country Boy Act

True, in "Father Figure," there's a father, but he's no longer married to the woman who's the mother of their two children. When the story opens, those kids are arriving in Memphis for an extended stay with their father, who lives in Midtown. The son, age 17, barely says a word — glares is more like it when his father tries to engage him in conversation, stares is more like it when the boy is sitting glued to the set — the TV set, which, during the first few days of this visit, runs nonstop (and that includes the latest paternity battles on Maury Povich's trash TV talk show).

The younger sister, though, is more forthcoming — and understanding — beneath her Goth exterior. She doesn't seem bothered (or is she?) by the fact that her father is now in love and living with a man who is 15 years his junior, which may or may not be a problem for everybody involved: ex-husband, ex-wife, two children, and a guy who maybe missing the club scene, gay division. The problem here, definitely: the arrival of the son's girlfriend with some news. That's not all that's a problem, though. Read "Father Figure" to find out.

And to find out some background on the story, here's Marshall Boswell, the author and associate professor in the English Department at Rhodes College, in his own words — on "Father Figure" in particular and the art of the short story in general:

Did Abraham pimp Sarah? Was Onan a jerk? Did King David have a potty mouth? And were Samson and Delilah into S&M?

Those are the pressing questions asked, and answered, in The Uncensored Bible: The Bawdy and Naughty Bits of the Good Book, which is out in paperback this month from HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins.

The book's authors, professors John Kaltner and Steven L. McKenzie, both of Rhodes College, with the help of reporter (and satirist) Joel Kilpatrick, do a hell of a job mixing bona fide scholarship and good-hearted humor, and "funny as hell" is how one reviewer described it last year. Here's how the Flyer saw it.

Leave it to Kaltner, McKenzie, and Kilpatrick, though, to have the final say on a question that's had other scholars stumped: Does the Bible or does it not command bikini waxing?

First there was the fall of the dot-coms. Then there was the fall of Enron. Yesterday, there was the sentencing of Bernard Madoff to 150 years in prison. But now, it's time for the fall of Core Communications: the fictionalized big-business scam at the heart of Memphian Eric Barnes' debut novel, Shimmer (Unbridled Books).

Barnes is discussing and signing copies of Shimmer at Davis-Kidd Booksellers today, June 30th, starting at 6 p.m. Just don't expect the author to be quitting his day job anytime soon. (He's publisher of the Memphis Daily News and the Memphis News.) And don't think of Shimmer as another corporate thriller. Barnes doesn't see it that way. Here's why. And here's more.

"I thought I knew you better than anyone, but after reading your book, I realize I didn't know you at all. Now I love you even more."

That's Dolly Parton speaking to her agent, Sam Haskell, and she's referring to Haskell's book (written with the help of David Rensin), Promises I Made My Mother (Ballantine Books). But Parton was far from being Haskell's only and biggest client at the William Morris Agency in Los Angeles, where he worked — from the mailroom fresh out of Ole Miss to heading the company's worldwide television division — for 26 years.

Count, among Haskell's clients and in no particular order: George Clooney, Bill Cosby, Kathie Lee Gifford, Ray Romano (the Gomer Pyle reference above appears in Romano's foreword to the book), Whoopi Goldberg, Nell Carter, Debbie Allen, Delta Burke, Martin Short, Kirstie Alley, Tony Danza, Lily Tomlin, Malcolm Jamal Warner, Swoosie Kurtz, Lucie Arnaz, and His Royal Highness the Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex (youngest son of Queen Elizabeth).

And count, among the TV shows Haskell is most proud to have been behind and in no particular order: The Cosby Show, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Mad About You, Everybody Loves Raymond, Lost, Murphy Brown, Sisters, Suddenly Susan, Live with Regis & Kathie Lee, King of Queens, and Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?.

What's a guy from Amory, Mississippi (pop. 7,000, not far from Tupelo) doing in such company and behind such shows? He's doing his best to honor the lessons taught by his mother, as promised in the title of his book. Haskell will be signing at Davis-Kidd Booksellers on Monday, June 22nd, at 6 p.m.

And note: All proceeds from the sale of the book go directly to the author's favorite charities, among them the Rotary Foundation of America. Why the Rotary? Because, as Haskell said with a laugh in a recent phone conversation, "I was Rotary Boy of the Year in 1973!"

Here, in his own words: Sam Haskell.

L.R. Clothier on Union is known for its cut. But Saturday it'll be all about the "cutthroat world of publishing" when author Joy "Deja" King heads a meet-and-greet writers' workshop on how to publish, how to market, and basically how to make it in today's challenging book business.