The controversy surrounding schools bearing Confederate names brings into question how figures like Sidney Lanier deserve to be recognized. Vanished in the Unknown Shade, a
In a bit of great news, American Happiness, recently published by NewSouth Books, wowed the judges of the Balcones Prize, winning the 2016 award for
2017 is already proving to be a busier year than most for Alabama Poet Laureate Emeritus Sue Brannan Walker. January saw the publication of her imaginative long-form poem It’s Good Weather for Fudge: Conversing with Carson McCullers, with an introduction by McCullers scholar Carlos Dews, released to commemorate the 100th anniversary of McCullers’s birth on February 19 …
American Happiness has been selected as a finalist in the Seven Sisters Book Awards, which recognize talented female authors in seven categories. President Lynn Hinton notes that the awards celebrate the stories of women and the women who write them, and says she is excited about this second year of the awards program …
On February 7, 2016, Andrew Glaze, Alabama’s eleventh poet laureate, died peacefully in his sleep in his home in Birmingham, Alabama. He was 95 years old. He was an American master, who wrote with astonishing vigor and clarity for more than 60 years. In 2012, Alabama Governor Robert Bentley commissioned Glaze as the state’s eleventh Poet Laureate at a ceremony at the State Capitol in Montgomery …
Kentucky poet Charles Semones died on September 13, 2015. He was 78. Although he lived in Harrodsburg in his latter years, he was originally from the Deep Creek community of Mercer County, Kentucky, west of Harrodsburg, a rural landscape of stark ridges and hollows which informed much of the writer’s work. He was the author of And All the Layered Light: Last Poems, published in NewSouth Books’s “The Conecuh Series” in 2007 …
Andrew Glaze, Poet Laureate of Alabama and author of the forthcoming poetry collection Overheard in a Bookstore and also Remembering Thunder, has been inducted into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame. The event was hosted by the Alabama Center for the Book and sponsored by the Alabama Writers’ Forum …
Voices Beyond Bondage: An Anthology of Verse by African Americans of the 19th Century, which seeks to reveal the largely unknown literary heritage of enslaved and free African Americans of that era, received prominent coverage recently with an Associated Press article and a discussion on the Tavis Smiley radio show …
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 …
In a recent article in the Huffington Post, Anis Shivani cited poet David Rigsbee (The Red Tower) as one of eight emerging poets and fiction writers who represent “the cutting-edge of today’s literary world.” As part of the “Video Reading Series,” Rigsbee and his fellow writers are featured in videos reading selections from their works and are also given the opportunity to present a behind-the-scenes look at their writing. Each writer presents a short elucidation on their own work, explaining the writing process as well as the roots and vision of their pieces …