Vince Matthews event, CD release with Frye Gaillard at Country Music Hall of Fame
On Saturday, June 6, 2015, Frye Gaillard will read from his book, Watermelon Wine: Remembering the Golden Years of Country Music, at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville. Gaillard will be part of a celebration of the life and legacy of the late Vince Matthews, a songwriter whose songs were recorded by Johnny Cash, Gordon Lightfoot, Crystal Gayle, Gene Watson, Charlie Pride, Waylon Jennings and others …
Remembering Guy Carawan, civil rights activist and folk singer
Civil rights activist and folk singer Guy Carawan died on May 3 after a long illness. Guy and his wife Candie co-authored Sing For Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement Through Its Songs, published by NewSouth Books in 2007. Carawan was perhaps best known for introducing the song “We Shall Overcome” to the civil rights movement. In a tribute to the musician, National Public Radio featured excerpts from an archived story on the song …
Journey to the Wilderness by Frye Gaillard a beautiful “meditation” on how Civil War is remembered
Journey to the Wilderness: War, Memory, and a Southern Family’s Civil War Letters, by award-winning author Frye Gaillard and newly published by NewSouth Books, has garnered strong early reviews. Readers praise the elegance of Gaillard’s prose and the insight of his commentary on a very personal topic: his ancestors’ Civil War experiences and his own changing view of the war from his typical Southern upbringing through his adult reflections on its effects and meaning …
The Week on Bob Zellner’s walk to protest demise of rural American healthcare
The USA edition of the British paper The Week featured Bob Zellner (pictured fourth from left), author of The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement, published by NewSouth Books, in a article on the partnership between a conservative and a progressive activist advocating on behalf of rural healthcare, an endangered species …
Guy and Candie Carawan honored for lifetime of social justice cultural education
Guy and Candie Carwan, authors of Sing For Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement Through Its Songs, published by NewSouth Books, were honored recently by the East Tennessee Historical Society, the Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound, McClung Historical Collection, and the Knox County Public Library with a celebration of their work for social justice. The program included a photography exhibit, showing of rare video footage from the civil rights era, and a musical performance …
Eugene Bullard named to Booklist Top 10 Multicultural Nonfiction Books for Youth list
2014 proved to be a banner year for the YA biography Eugene Bullard: World’s First Black Fighter Pilot by Larry Greenly, and the honors continue with the new year. After receiving two awards for YA literature — the New Mexico/Arizona Literary Award and the Moonbeam Children’s Book Award — the book has just been honored by Booklist magazine …
Dothan Eagle profiles Mac Otts’s compelling new memoir on race
The Dothan Eagle recently profiled S. M. “Mac” Otts, author of Better Than Them: The Unmaking of an Alabama Racist in connection with Mr. Otts’s presentation at the Houston-Love Memorial Library. The feature recounts the story of a young man ready to assault civil rights protesters who grew to become the adoptive father of an interracial child, dedicated to improving relations between blacks and whites …
NPR’s Here and Now interviews Voices Beyond Bondage editor Erika DeSimone
Voices Beyond Bondage editor Erika DeSimone was interviewed last week on National Public Radio’s “Here and Now.” In a lively exchange, DeSimone told host Peter O’Dowd about the 19th century African American literary movement celebrated in her newly published anthology, co-edited with Fidel Louis. Only recently have scholars even begun to look at the verse that appeared in scores of black-owned newspapers dating from the antebellum and postbellum periods. Not surprisingly, says DeSimone, readers have been intrigued by the beauty and strength of the poems within the book’s pages …
ArtsATL interviews three-time Georgia Author of the Year Ted Dunagan
Young adult author Ted Dunagan, winner of the Georgia Author of the Year for his first three novels, starting with A Yellow Watermelon, was interviewed recently by ArtsATL. The amiable author chatted with Sarah Sacha Dollacker about his childhood desire to become a writer and the inspiration for his books …
Heaven and Earth Collide author Alan Cross quoted in Washington Post; book reviewed on Bill Tammeus’s Faith Matters blog
Alan Cross, author of When Heaven and Earth Collide: Racism, Southern Evangelicals, and the Better Way of Jesus, was quoted recently in a Religion News Service article on current events in Ferguson, Missouri and New York that ran in papers across the country, most prominently in the Washington Post. He noted that “what often happens when white evangelicals try to speak into this is that we continue to think first in terms of our own position. We should consider what people in the black community are saying, what are they going through, what is their experience” …