Rheta Grimsley Johnson, award-winning author of Poor Man’s Provence, is just one of many NewSouth authors profiled on the Alabama Center for the Book’s This Goodly Land: Alabama’s Literary Landscape website. The Alabama Center for the Book’s This Goodly Land project features an interactive map where you can search Alabama’s vast literary landscape by county or author …
Calvin Kytle, author of the Depression-era novel Like a Tree, died June 5, 2008; he was 88. Kytle was also the author of the young-adult biography Gandhi, Soldier of Nonviolence and Who Runs Georgia? with Congressman James Mackay. He founded Seven Locks Press in 1978, publishing authors include Bill Moyers. He worked as a reporter for The Atlanta Journal Constitution and the Calhoun, Ga., Times, as well as an executive for Nationwide Insurance company. Kyle served as deputy director of the US Community Relations Service, created by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, from 1964-1965 …
Poet David Rigsbee offered this remembrance of Southern novelist and poet George Garrett, who died at the end of May 2008, at 78 …
Author Ted Dunagan’s book A Yellow Watermelon was featured on the NBC-15 Mobile, Alabama news’s “Here’s Darwin” segment. Reporter Darwin Singleton visited with Ted after the author spoke with Mrs. Fulton, Mrs. W. Smith, and Mrs. Sessions classes at Dunbar Middle School on April 24, 2008. Ted spoke with the students about Yellow Watermelon, and how the book’s setting was influenced by Ted’s youth in Grove Hill. Darwin praised the book as engaging for students, and yet “older adults find it engrossing as well” …
Gerald Duff, author of the short story collection Fire Ants, describes a recent session at the Virginia Festival of the Book …
Congratulations to former NewSouth intern Matthew Nelson, who will be working in Santa Monica, California, this semester as a script-reading intern for Lions Gate Entertainment …
Bill Elder’s memoir All Guts and No Glory recounts Bill’s struggles to break racial barriers with a a courageous group of white and black student athletes at Northeast State Junior College in Alabama in the early 1970s. Recently Bill watched Dan Klores’s documentary Black Magic, about basketball players at historically black colleges and universities during the civil rights movement, and he shares his thoughts about the program …
Fire Ants, the new short story collection by Gerald Duff, is a finalist for the Jesse Jones Award for Best Book of Fiction in 2007, from the Texas Institute of Letters. The winner of the award will be announced April 19 at the organization’s annual banquet in Dallas, Texas …
Anna Olswanger, author of Shlemiel Crooks, spoke as part of a panel discussion on February 21 with the Women’s National Book Association, New York Chapter …
At the On the Brink conference at Jacksonville State University in Alabama, author Gerald Duff wonders at the meaning of Southern literature …