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 …
Writer, professor, and civil-rights activist Dr. Leslie W. Dunbar died January 4, 2017 in New Orleans, three weeks from his 96th birthday. In the turmoil of the 1960s, Dunbar worked with the Southern Regional Council, helping — among other initiatives — to create the Voter Education Project; the project is credited with registering two million African American voters. Later that decade Dunbar directed the Field Foundation, dedicated to child welfare and civil rights, including funding Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign and the Children’s Defense Fund …
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 …
In an interview with SIBA’s Lady Banks’ Commonplace Book newsletter, author Frye Gaillard talks about the craft of historical novelist. Gaillard’s new book for young readers, Go South to Freedom, relates an “as told to” slavery story, shared with him by an elderly neighbor …
NewSouth Books has enjoyed working the Osher Institute for Lifelong Learning in a partnership that has continued for seven years. OLLI is a program for learning in retirement for adults 50 and older. Members can choose from offerings that include academic courses as well as recreational and health activities …
William Heath (The Children Bob Moses Led) is the winner of the Spur Award for Best Western Historical Nonfiction for his new book William Wells and and the Struggle for the Old Northwest. The Spur Awards are given by the Western Writers of America. Heath’s is the first biography of William Well, a frontiersman born to Anglo parents and captured and raised by Miami Indians …
One NewSouth author pays homage to another in the current issue of Alabama Heritage magazine. Faye Gibbons, author of the young adult novel Halley, penned a beautiful appreciation of Suzanne Pickett, whose memoir The Path Was Steep: A Memoir of Appalachian Coal Camps During the Great Depression was rereleased by NewSouth Books in 2013 …
John Pritchard, author of the Junior Ray series, was amused to see himself listed as a “legend” among Mississippi authors on the website for the Mississippi Arts and Entertainment Experience, a cultural center set to open in 2017. He noted, “There are some, in fact, who might insist that I have always been entirely fictitious!” …
Rod Davis (South, America) and co-panelists Christopher Cook and Eusebio Diaz presented recently on “Crime Fiction: The Genre of Dissent, Values and Codes of Conduct” at the Gemini Ink’s State of the Book conference …
Legendary civil rights attorney Fred Gray spoke to the Montgomery Advertiser about his experience as a delegate for Hillary Clinton at the recent Democratic National Convention …