From Mt. Juliet to Three WNBA Titles — and Now a Children’s Book About the Songs a Father Leaves Behind
Long before the championship rings, Alysha Clark was a Mt. Juliet kid — one of ours, working on her jumper at Mount Juliet High School while the city around her was still small enough that everybody knew whose daughter she was.
Two decades later, the résumé is remarkable by any measure: a college career at Middle Tennessee State in which she led all of NCAA Division I in scoring in back-to-back seasons, a long professional run that produced three WNBA championships, and a Sixth Player of the Year award that recognized something Wilson County recognized a long time ago — that she is the kind of athlete who makes whatever group she joins better.
This summer she added a title nobody saw coming on a stat sheet. She wrote a children's book.
“Paw Paw's Playlist”
The book, co-written with Kiara Marsh, arrived in late June. Clark timed the release to what would have been her father's 77th birthday. He passed away in 2022, and the seasons that followed were, by her own account, played in his honor — a private grief carried through very public arenas.
The idea came from watching the youngest people in her family try to make sense of losing the man they called Paw Paw. Grief has a vocabulary adults reach for instinctively and children mostly don't. What a five-year-old has instead is memory in fragments: a smell, a chair, a song that used to come on in the car. The book takes that seriously, using music as the thread that keeps a person present after they're gone, and gives families a way into a conversation most of them would rather avoid until they can't.
It is, in other words, a book written for a very specific set of kids — her nieces and nephews — that turns out to be a book for a great many others.
Why it lands differently here
Mt. Juliet has grown enormously in the years since Clark left. The population has more than doubled since she was in high school; Providence Marketplace turned a crossroads into a destination, and a good share of the people reading this moved in long after she graduated. That is exactly why the story is worth telling. A city that adds thousands of neighbors a year has to work at knowing its own history, and part of that history is the fact that one of the most accomplished basketball players Tennessee has produced learned the game on courts a short drive from where you're sitting.
It also lands differently because of what she chose to do with the platform. Plenty of retired-or-retiring athletes write books. Most of them write about themselves. Clark wrote a picture book for grieving children and put her father's nickname on the cover.
Where to find it
“Paw Paw's Playlist” is available through major online booksellers. It's a natural fit for school counselors, church libraries, and any family navigating a loss with small children in the house — and it's a good excuse to tell your kids that the woman who wrote it grew up right here.
Want more of the hometown? Take a look at our local's guide to things to do in Mt. Juliet, from Charlie Daniels Park to Providence Marketplace.
