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Howell Heflin inducted to Alabama Men’s Hall of Fame

Former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice and US Senator Howell Thomas Heflin will be inducted into the Alabama Men’s Hall of Fame on Tuesday, September 20, 2011, and a plaque will be inscribed with his name in the Samford University library. Heflin died in 2005. In 2001, NewSouth Books published his authorized biography, A Judge in the Senate, by John Hayman with Clara Ruth Hayman. Senator Edward Kennedy called A Judge in the Senate “required reading for all citizens who believe that one person can make a difference” …

Alan Gribben videos, podcasts on Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn

As teachers across the country prepare to return two classic works to their classrooms with the help of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn: The NewSouth Edition, book editor Alan Gribben has released a series of online videos and podcasts intended to guide educators in presenting these books. The six videos available on YouTube are “Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn as Companion Works,” “Three Criticisms Leveled at Huck Finn” …

Solomon Seay on post-racial America with Stetson Law Project

Renowned civil rights lawyer Solomon Seay Jr. talks with Stetson University law professor Bob Bickel about Seay’s personal and professional struggles for equality, including discussion of his well-received memoir Jim Crow and Me, in a new online documentary as a part of Stetson University College of Law’s Oral History Project. As one of only three African American lawyers in Montgomery, AL, in the late 1950s, Seay braved the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow laws, and the state of Alabama’s entrenched racism in order to desegregate public schools and facilities …

Valerie Gribben talks fairytales, medicine in New York Times

An essay by NewSouth Books author Valerie Gribben, “Practicing Medicine Can Be Grimm Work,” appears in today’s New York Times Op-Ed pages. Gribben, a medical student at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, is the author of The Fairytale Trilogy, a collection of three of her young adult fantasy novels, including one she published with NewSouth when she was only sixteen years old. In her essay, Gribben remarks on how her fascination with fairytales has informed her understanding of her patients as a medical student …

Rheta Grimsley Johnson recalls Charles Rose, vibrant and true

One NewSouth author remembered another this past month. Syndicated newspaper columnist Rheta Grimsley Johnson called her former Auburn University English professor Charles Rose “vibrant and true” in her weekly column; Rose died June 6, 2011 at the age of 80. Johnson, the Pulitzer Prize-nominated columnist and author of Enchanted Evening Barbie and the Second Coming: A Memoir, took Rose’s creative writing course at Auburn in the 1970s …