guides · From the editor's notebook
8 Writers Who Call the Chattanooga Country Home
From a 1905 mountain poet to a National Book Award contender working on Lookout Mountain today, the writers who've made Chattanooga and its mountains their subject and their home.
For a mid-sized Southern city, Chattanooga and its mountains have produced and kept a remarkable run of writers -- from a turn-of-the-century mountain poet to a National Book Award contender working on Lookout Mountain today. Here's a reading list of authors who've made this country their subject and their home.
The voices that built the canon
Emma Bell Miles is the foundational one. Her 1905 book The Spirit of the Mountains documented Southern Appalachian life from the inside, written from Walden's Ridge above the city -- an artist-writer ahead of her time and the regional voice everything else grows from.
Christine Noble Govan (1898–1985) was a lifelong Chattanoogan who, with her daughter Emmy Govan West, wrote the vintage Lookout Mountain mystery series for young readers -- a mid-century staple still beloved by collectors.
Writing Chattanooga now
Jamie Quatro is the national name. Living on Lookout Mountain, she broke through with the story collection I Want to Show You More (2013) and the acclaimed novel Two-Step Devil (2024) -- literary fiction steeped in the mountain's geography and moral weather.
Cherie Priest, a UTC graduate who lived in the city, is the genre star -- best known for the steampunk Boneshaker, she set the Southern-gothic The Family Plot (2016) right here.
Natalie Lloyd writes from Chattanooga and hit the New York Times bestseller list with the middle-grade A Snicker of Magic (2014), set in a Tennessee town drawn from her own world.
Audrey Keown anchors the local historical-mystery shelf with Murder at Hotel 1911 (2020), set in a fictionalized grand Chattanooga hotel.
Dana Shavin spent years as a Times Free Press humor columnist and turned that voice into the memoir The Body Tourist (2014).
Sybil Baker rounds out the bench as a UTC creative-writing professor and novelist, part of the working literary community that keeps the city's writing scene alive.
The bottom line
It's a deep bench for a city this size -- mountain poets, bestsellers, and a literary-fiction heavyweight, all within sight of the same ridge. We surface what's worth reading; you pick the next one off the stack. See what's on this week at the Lineup.