Library News

May 17 is just around the corner. It's nearly time for the award-winning Children's Festival of Reading! With four stages and 50+ tents, you'll need a plan.

Nothing says spring like the crack of the bat. Here in East Tennessee, this spring is all about baseball. In anticipation of the opening of the ballpark, we are celebrating the national pastime with an exhibition and some programs. Plus, we have some suggested reading for your bedside table!

One hundred years ago, people were curious about Christmases of the past, too. By the 1920s, Isabella Cowan Rhea (1849-1935) had lived in downtown Knoxville for three quarters of a century, and her family had been in downtown since frontier times.

A new addition to 601 S. Gay Street is turning heads. But one head in particular is missing. If you’ve noticed the newly installed marble sculpture in a nook at the East Tennessee History Center, you will certainly notice a missing head, and a hand for that matter.

      To mark the McClung Historical Collection’s 13^th Moses Smith Day highlight, celebrating our esteemed Civil War veteran and Custom House policeman Moses Smith, McClung Reference Librarian Danette Welch looks at the life of another Knoxvillian who died on a November

The curtain is coming up on several theatre productions in our area, and Knox County Public Library is excited to help provide access to some of them through the Read City Explorer Pass program.

We tried something different this year, and it was clearly an epic hit.

With 500+ kids screaming at the top of their lungs, you’d think the Beatles were in the house—or Taylor Swift. The enthusiasm was real, but the star of the show was books and reading.

This year, recipe books and cards in the McClung Collection’s annual holiday cooking display feature Stella DeVault and Malinda Russell, local bakers who honed their culinary skills and business acumen during the days before the Civil War. 

When the Clarence Brown Film Festival takes place this fall, audiences will have the rare chance to see one of Brown's most renowned silent films, which had ostensibly gone missing for over 50 years.

Knox County Public Library will host its first college fair organized by teens on Thursday, March 2, 2023, 3:30–5:30 at the Powell Branch Library.

The McClung Historical Collection is happy to make available the newly processed Zygmunt J. B. Plater Papers.