The Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters recently named NewSouth authors John Pritchard and Rheta Grimsley Johnson to a short list of nominees for their annual awards ceremonies. Previous winners included such celebrated novelists as Richard Ford and Shelby Foote …
NewSouth author and civil rights activist Bob Zellner recently visited Huntingdon College as a guest speaker for a special Presidential Colloquy in his honor. Zellner, a Huntingdon alum, delivered his lecture on Monday, March 9, where he discussed his role in the civil rights movement as well as his memoir, The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement …
Dr. Robert Baldwin’s new memoir Life And Death Matters: Seeking the Truth About Capital Punishment, will be given to every state legislator in Alabama on Thursday, February 26 by the organization Alabama Arise as part of their lobbying effort against the death penalty. A note from Rev. Tom Duley, President of the Board, Arise Citizens Policy Project, and Kimble Forrister, State Coordinator, will accompany the book …
The Anti-Defamation League has chosen Michelle Edwards’s Chicken Man as one of their Recommended Books on Israel for kindergarten and elementary schools. The ADL describes their recommended Israel Book Connections titles as quality titles that present Israel while avoiding “stereotypes in presenting the complexities of the region” …
Newsday newspaper has published an editorial by NewSouth author and civil rights activist Bob Zellner, in which Zellner discusses the parallels between Barack Obama’s historic rise to the office of the President and the nonviolent struggle of those who paved the way for his success during the civil rights movement. NewSouth recently released Zellner’s memoir, The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement, in which Zellner tells how he grew from an Alabama Klan heritage to joined ranks with the black students who were sitting-in, marching, fighting, and sometimes dying to challenge the Southern “way of life” he’d been raised on but rejected. In recognition of Black History Month and Barack Obama’s recent election to the presidency, Zellner’s story of nonviolence in the struggle for racial equality has become especially relevant …
Author Frye Gaillard offers the following remembrance of Habitat for Humanity founder Millard Fuller, who died this past week. “I was stunned by the news that Millard Fuller had died. Seldom have I met a man more vital, more energetic or committed to his work” …
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Richard Whitt died Monday, January 26, at his home in Marietta, Georgia, of a heart attack; he was 64. Rich was the author of Behind the Hedges: Big Money and Power Politics at the University of Georgia, forthcoming from NewSouth Books …
Eighth grade students at Wilson Hall Middle School were asked if they preferred the young adult novel A Yellow Watermelon by Ted Dunagan, read by the class in October, or To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, which students recently finished reading. Many students chose A Yellow Watermelon, citing its simplicity and the fact that it is set in their own backyard. According to an article in The Clarke County Democrat, “Some liked Dunagan’s book because it was easier to read and it was about our own Clarke County” …
Renown civil right attorney Solomon S. Seay, Jr., speaks out about his new memoir Jim Crow and Me: Stories from My Life as a Civil Rights Lawyer on WBHM Birmingham radio’s Tapestry with Greg Bass, WTSU Troy radio’s Community Focus with Carolyn Hutcheson, and “Talk With Tonya” with Tonya Terry on WSFA Montgomery television …
Chuck Morgan, 78, one of the most colorful and powerful legal advocates for civil rights in the 1960s, died January 8, 2009, of complications of Alzheimer’s disease. He “died peacefully at his Destin, Fla., home,” the local newspaper reported. He was a larger-than-life personality who not only recognized the injustices in society but did something about them. NewSouth’s author Bob Zellner wrote movingly about Chuck in The Wrong Side of Murder Creek …