Sheldon Hackney remembered by Dixie Redux essayists and Chilmark Author Series
Friends and contributors to Dixie Redux: Essays in Honor of Sheldon Hackney came together at a July 31 program to remember Hackney, as part of the Chilmark Author Lecture Series at Martha’s Vineyard. The panel discussion, lead by journalist and friend of Hackney’s Charlayne Hunter-Gault, included a selection of the Dixie Redux contributors (each authors and scholars in their own right) Vernon Burton, Ray Arsenault, Steven Hahn, and Patricia Sullivan …
Huffington Post blog spotlights Voices Beyond Bondage: An Anthology of Verse by African Americans of the 19th Century
A Huffington Post blog entry by Erika DeSimone spotlights Voices Beyond Bondage: An Anthology of Verse by African Americans of the 19th Century, co-edited by DeSimone and Fidel Louis and recently released by NewSouth Books. In the blog post, “The Literary Movement America Forgot,” DeSimone shares her insights into “history-through-omission,” which developed while she and Louis were researching the book …
Crooked Letter I LGBT Essayists Respond to Human Rights Campaign Alabama Survey, Part 3: Elizabeth Craven
Concluding our series of responses to a recent Human Rights Campaign survey of LGBT Alabamians, with contributors to NewSouth’s forthcoming anthology Crooked Letter I: Coming Out in the South. From Elizabeth Craven: “Kith and kin, faith and family, loyalty to the land, the culture and the lifestyle marks a Southerner. Yet all the institutions that defines a life: home, work, worship, these are the very places where Southern gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people feel most threatened” …
Crooked Letter I LGBT Essayists Respond to Human Rights Campaign Alabama Survey, Part 2: B. Andrew Plant
Continuing our series of responses to a recent Human Rights Campaign survey of LGBT Alabamians, with contributors to NewSouth’s forthcoming anthology Crooked Letter I: Coming Out in the South. From B. Andrew Plant: “Surveys like this are important because they underscore that, no matter how far we have come in terms of LGBTQ acceptance, many people live every day with discrimination because of their sexual orientation or gender identity” …
Crooked Letter I LGBT Essayists Respond to Human Rights Campaign Alabama Survey, Part 1: Susan Benton
In 2015, NewSouth plans to release a book of Southern-themed LGBT coming-out stories, titled Crooked Letter I. Contributors to the anthology have sent their thoughts on a recent Human Rights Campaign in Alabama survey of LGBT Alabamians. Today’s thoughts are from Susan Benton: “We have made great progress, but in Alabama, I still have reason to be afraid. I am married to an Australian. When we visit my parents in Alabama, my spouse must always carry her documentation showing she has a right to be in the country. We must have copies of our marriage certificate, and our Medical Power of Attorney in case she must be admitted to a hospital, so that I am considered next-of-kin. Since Alabama does not recognize our marriage, we cannot and will not consider moving to Alabama …”
Remembering John Seigenthaler, with author John Pritchard
John Pritchard, author of three novels in the “Junior Ray” series, sent this remembrance of journalist and writer John Seigenthaler, who died in July 2014: “John Seigenthaler was perhaps the most central and admirable personality that defined the Nashville I lived in during the 1970s. He was the apotheosis of integrity and of all that was serious and good. Anybody who knew him, even if they were his political opposites, held him in lofty esteem for the serious, smart, and incredibly intelligent human being he was. Indeed, John’s personal and professional record was well known. He and I were by no means close friends, but we each had close friends who were close friends of us both …”
Texas Institute of Letters spotlights Rod Davis’s thriller South, America
The prestigious Texas Institute of Letters (TIL) has good words to say in its April/May/June newsletter about NewSouth Books author Rod Davis. His new thriller South, America, which has been described as “a triumph of Southern noir,” is finding strong reviews in a number of publications from the Southern Literary Review to the Dallas Morning News to the Austin Chronicle …
New from Keith Donnelly: Three Dragons Doomed; Three Deuces Down in paperback
Gumshoe Donald Youngblood is back in the fifth of author Keith Donnelly’s Donald Youngblood mysteries, Three Dragons Doomed. The new hardcover arrives just in time for the first paperback release of Donnelly’s first Youngblood novel, Three Deuces Down …
Anniston, Alabama’s pitfalls, triumphs, told in books
A new book by University of Alabama professor Ellen Spears, Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town, tackles environmental issues in Anniston, Alabama, citing NewSouth’s Beyond the Burning Bus by J. Phillips Noble, about the attacks on Freedom Riders in Anniston, and making powerful linkages between Anniston’s civil rights history and the polychlorinated biphenyls environmental crisis …
Announcing South, America, Rod Davis’s latest New Orleans noir mystery
In award-winning author and journalist Rod Davis’s newest novel, South, America, he returns to the Big Easy and introduces a dynamic new leading man, Jack Prine. South, America opens as Prine discovers a murder victim and finds himself drawn into a web of violence threatening the victim’s beautiful sister. They begin a dangerous, desperate flight through Alabama, the Delta, and back to New Orleans searching and evading button men, goons, and racial violence. Deadly ties extend to the Dixie Mafia, priceless stolen art, and debased Southern aristocracy. In a a final, startling showdown in the Arts District, no one’s survival is guaranteed …