Award-winning author Frye Gaillard is enjoying a banner year: his book Go South to Freedom has just been named a Jefferson Cup Honor Book for
Author Ibrahim Fawal (On the Hills of God, The Disinherited), who worked as the first assistant director on the classic Lawrence of Arabia sent this remembrance of actor Peter O’Toole: “One of my most vivid memories of working with Peter O’Toole took place early one morning, when David Lean asked me to go find Peter, who was late for the shooting of a certain scene …”
As Southern members of Congress continue to say “no” to most safety-net and stimulus proposals, the grim reality is that poverty is deepening across the nation and especially in the region. According to a report issued today by the Southern Education Foundation (SEF), extreme poverty in the United States increased during 2009 by 12.9 percent, expanding the number of people living below 50 percent of the poverty threshold by more than 2.1 million. As a result, extreme poverty was the fastest growing income group in America last year, and the South’s share of the increase was almost twice that of any other region of the country …
. . . in the 8/4/2010 New York Times Schott’s Vocab column. In the item, guest columnist David Crystal, a linguistics professor at the University of Bangor in Wales, writes about what he learned when he recently asked a 12-year-old to go through one of his manuscripts and underline anything she didn’t understand. The result — demonstrating that there’s a vast cultural knowledge gap between today’s youngsters and the rest of us — may seem obvious, but writers and editors working on material targeted for children or young adults still stumble over this every day …
Kindles, Sony Readers, Nooks, and other forms of ereaders have been prominently in the news during 2009. The long-heralded arrival of ebooks as a significant factor in the publishing industry finally seems to be here. We pondered the implications recently in Manhattan over coffee and tea with Chris Kerr, the senior partner in the Parson Weems sales group that represents NewSouth in the northeast. (We have sales reps in each region of the country to call on bookstores, chains, and wholesalers.) Chris is a 30-year veteran of book publishing and is one of the smartest, savviest book people we know. He asserts that this time around, the ebook is real …
Seems one talented poet has found another in this news from Mary Carol Moran, who shares that her next book will be published by Sue Walker’s Negative Capability Press on November 30 …
Normally, I’d say it’s just wrong when a raunchy blues standard is covered by a group of white suburban teenagers whose greatest life deprivation has probably been on the order of running out of cell phone minutes … except that they sounded sooo good. The occasion was the annual Blues Extravaganza at Tuscaloosa’s Bama Theatre on Friday night, May 1, 2009. The evening marked the conclusion of the 11th annual Alabama Blues Project spring camp and featured the Blues Camp Kids and special guest star Bobby Rush …
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 …