Peter Huggins, author of the forthcoming Junebug young adult novel In the Company of Owls, was recently featured in the video segment “Where are you from?” on the This Goodly Land website …
Southern Living magazine includes NewSouth author Gerald Duff’s short story collection Fire Ants as one of the books Texans are reading in their August 2008 issue …
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 …
Loretta Gillespie of The Decatur Daily has reviewed Poor Man’s Provence, popular syndicated columnist and NewSouth author Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s account of her life in Cajun Louisiana. Gillespie describes Johnson’s storytelling as “both humorous and heartwarming” and praises Johnson’s evocation of the sights, sounds, and “colorful characters” that pepper this text. Gillespie, too, notes the honest quality of Johnson’s narrative.
NewSouth author Warren Trest and former Alabama Governor John Patterson were featured on the Tapestry radio program on May 29, 2008. They spoke about Trest’s new biography of Patterson Nobody But the People: The Life and Times of Alabama’s Youngest Governor which one reviewer calls “a thoroughly readable and fair-minded account of John Patterson’s career, which was one of the most important in Alabama’s recent history” …
One Man’s Lincoln, a one-act, one-man play by NewSouth author Wade Hall is now playing at the Kentucky Repertory Theatre in Horse Cave, Kentucky. The production is being sponsored by the Kentucky Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission as a part of the state’s two-year celebration of the venerated president and will run shows in both 2008 and 2009 …
The Southern Political Report has posted an excerpt of Nobody But The People: The Life and Times of Alabama’s Youngest Governor, Warren Trest’s authorized biography of former Alabama Governor John Patterson. The excerpt recounts the murder of Patterson’s father, attorney Albert Patterson, an event that spurred John Patterson into politics and ultimately to the governorship …
Calvin Kytle, author of the Depression-era novel Like a Tree, died June 5, 2008; he was 88. Kytle was also the author of the young-adult biography Gandhi, Soldier of Nonviolence and Who Runs Georgia? with Congressman James Mackay. He founded Seven Locks Press in 1978, publishing authors include Bill Moyers. He worked as a reporter for The Atlanta Journal Constitution and the Calhoun, Ga., Times, as well as an executive for Nationwide Insurance company. Kyle served as deputy director of the US Community Relations Service, created by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, from 1964-1965 …
Happy Birthday, Ms. Windham! NewSouth joins the over two-hundred people who gathered last Sunday, June 1, at the Selma Public Library in wishing Kathryn Tucker Windham a happy ninetieth birthday. Guests at the library serenaded Alabama’s favorite storyteller with the sound of comb music, played with a comb and wax paper. As Ms. Windham described, “I’m a great believer in laughter. That’s why I think these comb concerts work, because they make people laugh” …
Poet David Rigsbee offered this remembrance of Southern novelist and poet George Garrett, who died at the end of May 2008, at 78 …