Larry Brown  was an American novelist, short story and nonfiction writer. He was born in and grew up near Oxford, Mississippi. He won numerous awards including the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award for fiction, the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Award, and Mississippi’s Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He was also the first two-time winner of the Southern Book Award for Fiction. Ellen Douglas recognized and encouraged Brown early in his efforts to begin a writing career. Brown is the author of Dirty Work, Father and Son, Joe, and Big Bad Love. Joe was made into a film starring

Alice Childress was born in Charleston, South Carolina. She was an actress, playwright, and author with a career that spanned four decades. Her play Trouble in Mind won an Obie award for the best off-Broadway play of the 1955–56 season. Although Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White was completed in 1962, no New York theater would produce it. Florence, a one-act play, is often anthologized. Of her work, Childress said: “My writing attempts to interpret the ‘ordinary’ because they are not ordinary Each human is uniquely different. Like snowflakes, the human pattern is never cast twice. We are uncommonly and marvelously intricate in thought and action, our problems are most complex and, too often, silently borne.”

Associated with the Fugitives and Southern Agrarians, poet Donald (Grady) Davidson was born in Tennessee and earned both a BA and an MA from Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Davidson published five collections of poetry The Outland Piper (1924), The Tall Men (1927), Lee in the Mountains and Other Poems (1938), The Long Street: Poems (1961), and Collected Poems: 1922–1961 (1966). In the 1920s, Davidson co-founded and co-edited the influential journal The Fugitive. His prose writings include an essay in I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930); a collection, Still Rebels, Still Yankees and Other Essays (1957); and Southern Writers in the Modern World (1958), which he first delivered as a lecture at Mercer University in Georgia. Davidson wrote a two-volume history of Tennessee, The Tennessee Volume One: The Old River: Frontier to Secession (1946) and The Tennessee Volume Two: The New River: Civil War to TVA (1948). His novel,The Big Ballad Jamboree, was published posthumously by the University Press of Mississippi (1996). Davidson taught English at Vanderbilt University from 1920 to 1968. He spent summers teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont.

Joyce Carol Oates described James Dickey’s perspective as a desire to “to take on ‘his’ own personal history as an analogue to or a microscopic exploration of 20th-century American history.” Dickey described his style as “country surrealism.” He flew more than 100 combat missions during World War II. “I came to poetry with no particular qualifications,” he recounted in Howard Nemerov’s Poets on Poetry. “I had begun to suspect, however, that there is a poet—or a kind of poet—buried in every human being like Ariel in his tree, and that the people whom we are pleased to call poets are only those who have felt the need and contrived the means to release this spirit from its prison.” Dickey is the author of Deliverance and more than two dozen volumes of poetry. The Complete Poems of James Dickey was published in 2013.

John Ridge, born Skah-tle-loh-skee (Yellow Bird) in 1802, in the village of Oothacaloga, near present-day Calhoun, Georgia, was from a prominent Cherokee Nation family. He was top of his class at the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut.  Early in his career, he worked for the Creek Nation, helping them to present their anti-Removal case to politicians and the press. Later, he was among the signatories of the spurious Treaty of New Echota of 1835, by which Cherokee lands east of the Mississippi were ceded in exchange for lands in Indian Territory. Ridge’s numerous political tracts that appeared in Georgia newspapers during the Removal era have not been collected nor re-printed.

CELESTINE SIBLEY (1914-1999)

Celestine Sibley was a celebrated columnist at the Atlanta Constitution from 1941 to 1999. Kim Purcell writes in the New Georgia Encyclopedia, that “Over her long career, [Sibley] wrote more than 10,000 columns and many news stories of astonishing range, dealing with such varied topics as politics and key lime pie. Sibley was one of the most popular and long-running columnists for the Constitution, and her well-written and poignant essays on southern culture made her an icon in the South. Regarded by her colleagues as a reporting legend, Sibley was also the accomplished author of nearly thirty books published between 1958 and 1997.” She wrote fiction, nonfiction, and mystery novels. She won the first Townsend Prize for Fiction in 1982 for her novel Children, My Children and in 1988 published a memoir Turned Funny. She was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2007 and into Georgia Women of Achievement in 2010.

Lillian Smith (1897-1966)

Lillian Eugenia Smith was born in Jasper, Florida in 1897. When her father’s Florida businesses failed in 1915, the Smith family came to Rabun County, Georgia, where her father had recently acquired property on Screamer Mountain and where he opened a summer camp for girls. At first Lillian worked with her family to create the camp, but with her father’s blessing, she soon became the owner and director of Laurel Falls Camp for Girls. This institution continued until 1949 and developed quite a reputation for being a progressive and well-rounded camp for young women, not only throughout the South, but across the country.

Lillian Smith emerged in the 1940s at the forefront of the Southern debate on segregation, where she was at least a decade ahead of other white liberals and stood virtually alone in calling for an immediate end to segregation laws and practices. Meanwhile, she was developing her talents as a fiction-writer. Her 1944 debut novel, Strange Fruit, was about a secret interracial love affair in a small Georgia town. In 1949 she published Killers of the Dream, a brilliant psychological and autobiographical work warning against the evils of segregation. Before her death in 1966, Smith would go on to publish several more books, fiction and nonfiction, and numerous articles and essays on social justice and racial equality, all of which were written from her home on Screamer Mountain.