Kathryn Tucker Windham, who died Sunday, was well-known as a story-teller and an author. Less well-known was her considerable talent as a photographer. Among Mrs. Windham’s favorites of her own books was Encounters, a 1998 collection of photos and essays edited and published by NewSouth editor Randall Williams …
Writer and teacher Charles Rose died this past week in Auburn, Alabama. He taught literature at Auburn University for thirty-four years, and was the author of numerous short stories, screenplays, and the memoir In the Midst of Life: A Hospice Volunteer’s Story. His collection of short stories, A Ford in the River, is forthcoming from NewSouth Books …
We at NewSouth Books were saddened at the passing of our friend and author Kathryn Tucker Windham, who died at her home in Selma yesterday. Mrs. Windham was not only a favored author and storyteller of such works as the “Jeffrey” ghost story series; she was also a groundbreaking journalist (one of Alabama’s first female reporters) and a frequent contributor to NPR. Her latest book was Spit, Scarey Ann, and Sweat Bees: One Thing Leads to Another …
Dr. Alan Gribben, editor of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn: The NewSouth Edition, discussed the new volume this past month with the Costo Connection and Independent Publisher magazines. Each magazine gave Gribben the opportunity to continue to explain his motivation for releasing the edition, which offers replacements for the racial epithets found in the original text …
The Oprah show brought together today 179 participants from the 1961 Freedom Rides, in tribute to the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of that movement. In attendance was NewSouth author Bob Zellner, a SNCC field secretary who describes his experience with the Freedom Rides in his memoir The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement …
“The one belief I never revealed in three decades-plus was my disbelief,” writes syndicated newspaper columnist and NewSouth author Rheta Grimsley Johnson in a March 28 guest-post on the Washington Post “On Faith” blog; Johnson would later talk about religion in her memoir Enchanted Evening Barbie and the Second Coming. “I figured that straw for a Bible Belt columnist would be the last. I never said I did believe. But I never said I did not. It was a sin of omission” …
A number of reviewers have complimented Anna Olswanger’s award-winning children’s book Shlemiel Crooks for the music of its Yiddish-inflected language. Now, Shlemiel Crooks and a number of Olswanger’s other stories will actually be set to music, as a new Shlemiel Crooks musical comes to the stage. Shlemiel Crooks: The Musical, directed by Wendy Gross Baker, premieres April 10 at the Merkin Concert Hall in New York, featuring the hall’s professional Poppy Seed Players troupe …
The important conversation continues on the NewSouth edition of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. On last night’s episode of 60 Minutes, reporter Byron Pitts held a far-reaching conversation with NewSouth Books editor Randall Williams and University of Oregon professor David Bradley about the controversies surrounding Twain’s works, the use of racial epithets in today’s society, and NewSouth’s publication …
Civil rights activist Bob Zellner continues to advocate for equality and understanding even while balancing some newfound attention. Zellner has been interviewed for an Oprah show segment on the fiftieth anniversary of the Freedom Rides set to air May 4, and and pre-production activities continue on a feature film to be executive produced by Spike Lee based on Zellner’s award-winning memoir, published by NewSouth Books, called The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement …
We want to be first in line next year when the movie Deadline, based on Mark Ethridge’s novel Grievances, arrives in theaters. The movie stars Steve Talley (Brothers & Sisters) and Academy Award nominee Eric Roberts (Runaway Train, Heroes, Entourage) as newspaper reporters working to solve a twenty year-old civil rights murder in South Carolina; the story is based on actual events from Ethridge’s work as a newspaper reporter …