REVIVAL
REVIVAL
LOST SOUTHERN VOICES FESTIVAL
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Welcome to the online home of Revival: Lost Southern Voices — A Festival for Readers, a two-day celebration of lost and underappreciated Southern writers. During this literary festival, invited writers and scholars discuss favorite authors whose works no longer receive the attention and reading they deserve. We invite the public, scholars, students, writers, and lovers of good books to join us as we [re]discover lost voices.
Please scroll down for information about our March 24-27, 2021, virtual festival.
Our 2017, 2018, and 2019 festivals were wonderful successes, and we are disappointed we were not able to hold an in-person 2020 festival due to the Coronavirus pandemic. However, we held a virtual event, complete with a virtual specialty cocktail, “The Lillian,” in honor of the trailblazer Lillian Smith on what would have been her 123rd birthday.
On Dec. 11, 2020, Revival: Lost Southern Voices — A Festival for Readers, co-hosted by Georgia Center for the Book, with support from Georgia Humanities, screened “Lillian Smith: Breaking the Silence,” a documentary film by the talented and gracious Hal Jacobs. Missed it? Here’s the trailer, and you may rent it for $5: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/lilliansmith/
Our 2021 Revival: Lost Southern Voices — A Festival for Readers Virtual Events:
Jan. 25-30: Atlanta Music Festival: Preserving the “Lost Voices” of West Atlanta Watershed Community
See the Atlanta Music Festival promotional trailer here: https://vimeo.com/498338389/2d2ebbfcd8
Atlanta Music Festival is a partnership between the historic First Congregational Church and Meridian Herald. It originated at First Church in 1910, right after the 1906 race riots when Henry Hugh Proctor, its first Black pastor, conceived the idea of exploring the intersection of social justice and the arts. This year’s Festival is focused on the arts and environmental justice, and in particular, the lost voices of Proctor Creek and the West Atlanta watershed.
The Festival is free and online this year. A new video (produced by the wonderful Hal Jacobs) will be posted each night Jan. 25-30 at 7:30 p.m. The Festival culminates with a brilliant concert of works by Black composers focused on water and the natural world by Metropolitan Opera star Morris Robinson, Atlanta legend Timothy Miller, Wanda Yang Temko, and the Meridian Chorale. WABE-90.1’s Molly Samuel and the Rev. Thee Smith will read poetry by Black poets. Please share this event!
Watch here Jan. 25-30 at 7:30 p.m.: https://vimeo.com/showcase/7889729
For more info: www.atlantamusicfestival.org
March 24 at 1 p.m.: Our kickoff event! Former Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize Winner Natasha Trethewey
Revival: Lost Southern Voices — A Festival for Readers has partnered with the Susan Thomas Lectureship and Perimeter College Honors and English departments to bring Natasha Trethewey (virtually). This event will be free and open to the public on the WebEx platform. More information about registration will be announced soon. Trethewey will be reading from and discussing her memoir, “Memorial Drive,” in which she recovers and reclaims the lost voice of her mother, a victim of domestic violence.
March 24-27: Revival: Lost Southern Voices — A Festival for Readers (Virtual) Details coming soon…
Until then, stay safe and curl up with a good [re]discovered book!
2019 Speakers
Sandy Ballard
Joanmarie Bañez
Jeffery Beam
Publications and Prizes
An Elizabethan Bestiary: Retold
, An Invocation
, Contemporay Gay American Poets and Playwrights
, Gospel Earth
, Gospel Earth
, Life of the Bee
, Light and Shadow
, Midwinter Fires
, MountSeaEden
, The Beautiful Tendons: Uncollected Queer Poems 1969 – 2007
, The Broken Flower
, The Fountain
, The New Beautiful Tendons: Collected Queer Poems 1969-2012
, Visions of Dame Kind
, What We Have Lost: New & Selected Poems
Charmed Lives
, Collective Brightness
, Gay Roots
, Light in Ordinary Things
, Literary Trails of the North Carolina Piedmont
, New Growth: Shauna Holiman and Friends – New Songs and Spoken Poems
, Son of the Male Muse
, Succinct The Broadstone Anthology of Short Poems
, Visiting Dr. Williams
Jeffery Beam
Valerie Boyd
Valerie Boyd
Clifford Brooks
Clifford Brooks was born in Athens, Georgia. His first poetry collection, The Draw of Broken Eyes & Whirling Metaphysics, was re-issued by Kudzu Leaf Press in August 2018. His second full-length poetry volume, Athena Departs: Gospel of a Man Apart, as well as a limited-edition poetry chapbook, Exiles of Eden, were published by Kudzu Leaf Press in 2017. Clifford is the founder of The Southern Collective Experience, a cooperative of writers, musicians and visual artists, which publishes the journal of culture The Blue Mountain Review and hosts the NPR show Dante’s Old South. He is on the faculty of The Company of Writers and provides tutorials on poetry through the Noetic teaching application.
Clifford Brooks
Jim Clark
Jim Clark
Courtney George
Courtney George
Jessica Handler
Jessica Handler
Joshua Harmon
Joshua Harmon
William J. (Billy Joe) Harris
William J. (Billy Joe) Harris
Gregory Harris
Gregory Harris
Susan K. Harris
Susan K. Harris
DaMaris B. Hill
DaMaris B. Hill
Katherine “Katie” Jentleson
Katherine “Katie” Jentleson
Caleb Johnson
Caleb Johnson
Hank Klibanoff
Hank Klibanoff
Alison Law
Alison Law
Jessica Lindberg
Jessica Lindberg
Molly McGehee
Molly McGehee
Pearl McHaney
Pearl McHaney
Kari Miller
Kari Miller
Andy Rogers
Andy Rogers
Josh Russell
Josh Russell
Buell Wisner
Buell Wisner is Assistant Professor of English at Georgia State University-Perimeter College. He received his B.A. from the University of Georgia and Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee. Buell currently serves as fiction editor for The Chattahoochee Review. His research interests include post-war British Literature, historical fiction, and postmodernism, with lectures and publications on works by Iris Murdoch, John Fowles, A.S. Byatt, John Barth, and Peter Ackroyd. His recent scholarship has appeared in The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, The CEA Critic, and collections of essays about playwright Naomi Wallace and novelist William T. Vollmann.
Buell Wisner
Cecilia Woloch
Cecilia Woloch
Jamil Zainaldin
Jamil Zainaldin
Andrew Zawacki
Andrew Zawacki
Lost Southern Voices
A.R. AMMONS (1926–2001)
HARRIETTE ARNOW (1908 - 1986)
Harriette Arnow
LUCILLE CLIFTON (1936 - 2010)
Lucille Clifton
RALPH DENNIS (1931 - 1988)
Ralph Dennis
W.E.B. DUBOIS (1868 - 1963 )
W.E.B. Dubois
HENRY DUMAS (1934 - 1968)
Henry Dumas
JOHN EHLE (1925–2018)
John Ehle
RALPH ELLISON (1914 - 1994)
Ralph Ellison
KALI NICOLE GROSS (1972 - )
Kali Nicole Gross
JAMES BAKER HALL (1935 - 2009)
James Baker Hall
JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS
Joel Chandler Harris
BLAKE HAUSMAN
Blake Hausman
ZORE NEALE HURSTON (1891 - 1960)
Zora Neale Hurston
KENNETH IRBY (1936–2015)
Kenneth Irby
GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON(1880–1966)
Georgia Douglas Johnson
JAMES WELDON JOHNSON (1871 - 1938)
James Weldon Johnson
ROGER MANLEY
Roger Manley
SHARYN MCCRUMB (1948 - )
Sharyn McCrumb
CARSON MCCULLERS (1917 - 1967)
Carson McCullers
ALBERT MURRAY (1916 - 2013)
Albert Murray
MARY NOAILLES MURFREE (1850 - 1922 )
Mary Noailles Murfree
LEWIS NORDAN (1939 - 2012 )
Lewis Nordan
LEE SMITH (1944 -)
Lee Smith
FRANK STANFORD (1948 - 1978 )
Frank Stanford
T.S. STRIBLING (1881 - 1965)
T.S. Stribling
STEFFEN THOMAS (1906 - 1990)
Steffen Thomas
MARK TWAIN (1835 - 1910 )
Mark Twain
MANLY WADE WELLMAN (1903 - 1986)
Manly Wade Wellman
AMANDA KYLE WILLIAMS (1957 - 2018)
Amanda Kyle Williams
JOHNATHON WILLIAMS (1929 - 2008)
Johnathon Williams
BRENDA WILKINSON (1946 - )
TERRY WHITMORE (1947 - 2007)
SHERMAN ADAMS (1937-1985)
James Agee (1909-1955)
James Agee was a film critic for Time magazine, wrote the screenplay for The African Queen, and won the Pulitzer Prize for the novel, A Death in the Family, in 1958. He wrote the text following Walker Evans’ photographs published as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Ross Spears’s film AGEE: A Sovereign Prince of the English Language was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and was awarded a Blue Ribbon at the 1980 American Film Festival.
RAYMOND ANDREWS (1934-1991)
Raymond Andrews was an acclaimed novelist and chronicler of the African-American experience. He won the James Baldwin Prize for fiction in 1979 and was inducted posthumously into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2009. The film Somebody Else, Somewhere Else: The Raymond Andrews Story by Jesse Freeman is composed of original interviews with various friends, family members and literary scholars with archival footage of interviews with Andrews himself. Other interviewees include his brother Benny Andrews, a renowned visual artist, and novelists Philip Lee Williams, Terry Kay, Tony Grooms, Richard Bausch and Gary Gildner. Andrews’s books include Appalachee Red, Rosiebelle Lee Wildcat Tennessee and Baby Sweet’s (a Muskhogean County trilogy set in a fictional Southern locale drawn from Andrews’s youth spent in rural Georgia, a memoir The Last Radio Baby among others.
A former Kellogg Hunt Professor of English at Florida State University, Wendy Bishop is the author or editor of numerous books, essays, and articles on composition and creative writing pedagogy. Her twenty-two books include My Last Door from Anhinga Press. She was a frequent presenter and speaker at professional conferences. She served as chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication and as a co-vice president and member of the board of directors for the Associated Writing Programs (AWP).
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
Erskine Caldwell was an American novelist and short story writer. His books Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre received wide-acclaim and address poverty, racism, and social issues in the American South. In addition, Caldwell wrote 25 novels, 150 short stories, numerous other works, and edited the American Folkways series, a 28-volume series of books about different regions of the United States. With his wife photographer Margaret Bourke-White, Caldwell collaborated on three photo-documentaries including You Have Seen Their Faces (1937).
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.”
Born in Puerto Rico and raised in New Jersey, Cofer was a Regents’ and Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. Her writing career began with poetry and she became well known for her creative nonfiction. In 2010, Cofer was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. Her work includes adult and young adult short stories and novels, poetry, essays, and other nonfiction. Among her many works are The Latin Deli: Telling the Lives of Barrio Women, The Cruel Country, A Love Story Beginning in Spanish, Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood.
GUY DAVENPORT (1927-2005)
Guy Davenport’s The Death of Picasso: New and Selected Writing provides a wide representation of his work. He was a writer, illustrator, teacher, scholar, translator, and critic. He taught at Haverford College and the University of Kentucky. In an essay, Davenport claimed to “live almost exclusively off fried baloney, Campbell’s soup, and Snickers bars.” He published over forty books and received a MacArthur fellowship, among other honors
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.
Josephine Claxton chose the pseudonym Ellen Douglas when her first novel, A Family’s Affairs was to be published in 1962. Apostles of Light (1973) was a National Book Award finalist, but it is Can’t Quit You Baby that is the essential novel of her career. Douglas’s nonfiction includes Truth: Four Stories I Am Old Enough to Tell and Witnessing. Following Douglas’s death, Margalit Fox wrote in the New York Times that Douglas’s work “explored the epochal divide between the Old South and the New, examining vast, difficult subjects — race relations, tensions between the sexes, the conflict between the needs of the individual and those of the community — through the small, clear prism of domestic life.”
Zora Neale Hurston, author of Their Eyes Were Watching God, was a novelist, short story writer, folklorist, and anthropologist. Every Tongue Got to Confess, a collection of folktales gathered in the 1920s and discovered in the Smithsonian archives, was published posthumously in 2001. Alice Walker’s famous revival of Hurston’s work in the 1970s is the model for the Lost Southern Voices Festival.
SEABORN JONES (1942-2014)
Among Randall Kenan’s books, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead was named a New York Times Notable book in 1992. He taught at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University and currently teaches at UNC-Chapel Hill. He published a young adult biography of James Baldwin in 1993 and a collection of black oral histories from people around the United States and Canada, titled Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century, in 1999. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and other honors.
Horace Kephart was an American travel writer and librarian. He is best known as the author of Our Southern Highlands and the outdoors guide, Camping and Woodcraft. In 2005, the Hunter Library Special Collections at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina exhibited Horace Kephart: Revealing an Enigma, which can be viewed at https://www.wcu.edu/library/ digitalcollections/kephart
Sydney Lanier was an American musician, poet, and author. He served in the Confederate Army and worked on a blockade running ship, for which he was imprisoned. He often used dialects in his poetry and sometimes wrote in heightened English. He wrote Hymns of the Marshes; his most famous poems include “Corn,” “The Symphony,” “Centennial Meditation,” “The Song of the Chattahoochee,” “The Marshes of Glynn,” and “Sunrise.” The Sidney Lanier Cottage in Macon, Georgia, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Many schools, lakes, streets, and buildings bear the name Sidney Lanier.
RALPH EMERSON McGILL (1898-1969)
Ralph McGill was an American journalist and an anti-segregationist editor at the Atlanta Constitution newspaper. He received a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1959. His book The South and the Southerner (1963) was re-published by University of Georgia Press in 1992. McGill received honorary doctorates from dozens of universities and colleges, including Harvard, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. In his honor, The McGill Lecture is held annually at The Grady School of Journalism at the University of Georgia, featuring a nationally recognized journalist. His personal papers are available at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscripts and Rare Book Library (MARBL) at Emory University Library. McGill’s role in the campaign against segregation is depicted Michael Braz’s opera, A Scholar Under Siege, composed for the centenary of Georgia Southern University and premiered in 2007. The Best of Ralph McGill: Selected Columns, edited by Michael Strickland, was published in 1997.
Caroline Miller became the first Georgian to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1934 for Lamb in His Bosom, a novel that tells the history of Cean Smith and her family in the backwoods of southeast Georgia. A realistic, moving novel, Lamb in His Bosom, brought to new light by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese in 1993, can be read as a precursor to Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray. Miller was born in Waycross, Georgia, in 1903, and moved to Waynesville, North Carolina, in 1941. Her novel’s phenomenal success brought Harold Latham, MacMillan Publishing agent, to Atlanta for the 1935 Atlanta Writer’s Club Luncheon where he first met Margaret Mitchell and persuaded Mitchell to let him read her as-yet-incomplete novel.
MARION MONTGOMERY (1925-2011)
Albert Murray was a literary and jazz critic, novelist, essayist, and biographer. He held professorships, lectureships, and fellowships at various universities. He received the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for his music criticism in 1976. Murray and Ralph Ellison became close friends following Murray’s time at the Tuskegee Institute; their relationship is chronicled in the book, Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray. Murray was the co-founder of the program and institution, with Wynton Marsalis, of Jazz at Lincoln Center. His books include the Scooter trilogy (Train Whistle Guitar, The Spyglass Tree, and The Seven League Boots,; Stomping the Blues; From the Briarpatch File: On Context, Procedure, and American Identity; and The Blue Devils of Nada: A Contemporary American Approach to Aesthetic Statement.
A plantation owner who vowed to “write what is, even if it is unpleasant,” Julia Peterkin revolutionized American literature in the 1920s by writing seriously about the lives of black farmers. In five bold, lyrical books she pushed the bounds of realism to earn the startled praise of such intellectuals and literary artists as W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes. In 1929 Peterkin became the first Southern writer to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for her best-selling novel Scarlet Sister Mary.
Green Thursday, Black April, Scarlet Sister Mary, and Bright Skin chronicle the collapse of plantation agriculture in South Carolina, using the Gullah language in a literary way and portraying the points of view of black workers rather than their white owners. At the same time, Peterkin’s stories are often the thinly veiled autobiography of a southern white woman struggling to create something new out of the beauty and sorrow around her. Roll, Jordan, Roll, with text by Peterkin and photographs by her friend Doris Ulmann, is now one of the most hotly-collected documentary volumes of the twentieth century.
Peterkin paved the way both for the Southern Renaissance and for later African American writers.
Byron Herbert Reece authored four volumes of poetry and two collections of fiction. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1952. A collection of his selected poems, Fable in the Blood, was published by University of Georgia Press in 2002. Reece was posthumously inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2001. The Byron Herbert Reece Society, formed in 2002, has worked to create the Reece Farm and Heritage Center and with the Georgia Assembly to name Reece “Georgia’s Appalachian Poet/Novelist” and to designate Highway 129 from Blairsville to Neels Gap “The Byron Herbert Reece Memorial Highway.” The Byron Herbert Reece Society is an illustration of “reviving” a lost writer and bringing new readers to an author’s work.
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.
EVELYN SCOTT (1893-1963)
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.
Dubbed by Lorenzo Thomas a “swamprat Rimbaud,” Frank Stanford was a prolific poet and was called “one of the great voices of death” by Franz Wright. He studied engineering at the University of Arkansas while writing poetry. He authored over ten collections of poetry including his epic 15,283-line, 542-page The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. His posthumous collection, What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford, was a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award in 2015.
HOWARD WALDROP (1946 - )
Margaret Walker was an American poet and writer. She was involved in numerous writing groups while in Chicago, including the South Side Writers Group, where she was a close colleague of Richard Wright. When in 1942, Walker’s poetry collection For My People won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition, Walker became the first African American woman to receive a national writing prize. In 1975, Walker released three albums of poetry on Folkways Records – Margaret Walker Alexander Reads Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar and James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes; Margaret Walker Reads Margaret Walker and Langston Hughes; and The Poetry of Margaret Walker. The Margaret Walker Center in Jackson, Mississippi, founded as the Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People by Walker in 1968, is an archive and museum dedicated to the preservation, interpretation, and dissemination of African-American history and culture, that also seeks to honor Walker’s academic and artistic legacy. Walker’s books include the poetry collection This is My Century: New and Collected Poems (1989), the novel Jubilee that might be read as a companion fiction to Gone with the Wind, and the award-winning poem, “For My People.”
Sponsors
Georgia State University College of Arts and Sciences: Department of English, Kenneth M. England Professorship in Southern Literature, South Atlantic Center for the Institute of the Americas
Georgia State University Perimeter College: The Chattahoochee Review, Department of English, Honors College
This project is supported by Georgia Humanities, in partnership with the Georgia Department of Economic Development, through funding from the Georgia General Assembly.
Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library is proud to support the “Revival: Lost Southern Voices” festival.
The Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library collects and connects stories of human experience, promotes access and learning, and offers opportunities for dialogue for all wise hearts who seek knowledge.
Sponsors
We gratefully acknowledge the following sponsors for their help in bringing Revival: Lost Southern Voices Festival to life.
- Georgia State University College of Arts and Sciences: Department of English, Kenneth M. England Professorship in Southern Literature, South Atlantic Center for the Institute of the Americas
- Georgia State University Perimeter College: The Chattahoochee Review, Department of English, Honors College
- This project is supported by Georgia Humanities, in partnership with the Georgia Department of Economic Development, through funding from the Georgia General Assembly.
- Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library is proud to support the “Revival: Lost Southern Voices” festival.The Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library collects and connects stories of human experience, promotes access and learning, and offers opportunities for dialogue for all wise hearts who seek knowledge.
Georgia Center for the Book at DeKalb County Public Library in Downtown Decatur
215 Sycamore Street
Decatur, Georgia 30030
(404) 370-3070 x 2285
Fax: (404) 370-3091
Heading West on I-20
- Follow I-20 E to Maynard Terrace SE in DeKalb County.
- Take exit 61A from I-20 E Head east on I-20 E
- Keep left to stay on I-20 E
- Take exit 61A for Maynard Terrace
- Turn left onto Maynard Terrace SE(signs for Memorial Dr.)
- Turn right onto GA-154 E/Memorial Dr. SE
- Turn left onto GA-155 S N/Candler Rd SE
- Continue straight onto E Trinity Pl
- Turn right onto Church St
- Turn right onto Sycamore St
Heading East 0n I-20
- Take exit 60B for US-23 N/Moreland Ave.
- Merge onto US-23 N/Moreland Ave.
- Take the exit toward Dekalb Ave. NE
- Keep left at the fork to continue toward Dekalb Ave. NE
- Continue onto W Howard Ave.
- Turn left onto Commerce Dr.
- Turn right onto W Trinity Pl
- Turn left onto Church St
- Turn right onto Sycamore St
Heading South 0n I-85
- Take exit 248C toward GA-10 E/Freedom Pkwy/Carter Cent
- Use the right 2 lanes to turn right onto US-278 E/Ponce De Leon Ave NE
- Continue to follow Ponce De Leon Ave NE
- Slight right onto W Ponce de Leon Ave
- Turn right onto W Trinity Pl
- Turn left onto Church St
- Turn right onto Sycamore St
Heading North 0n I-85
- Use right lane exit 247 for I-20/Ralph D Abernathy Freeway toward Birmingham/Augusta
- Keep right at the fork for I-20 E/Augusta and Merge onto I-20 E
- Take Exit 60 B for US-23 N/Moreland Ave
- Merge onto US-23 N/Moreland
- Take exit toward Dekalb Ave NE
- Keep Left at the fork to continue toward Dekalb Ave NE
- Continue onto Dekalb Ave NE
- Continue onto W Howard Ave NE
- Turn left onto Commerce Dr.
- Turn right onto W Trinity Pl.
- Turn left onto Church St.
- Turn right onto Sycamore
FAQs
What is the cost to attend Revival: Lost Southern Voices Festival?
Thanks to our generous sponsors, there is no cost to attend the general sessions. The planning committee just requests that you register so we can plan accordingly.
If you wish to attend the Friday reception, which will feature heavy hors d’oeuvres and beverages, please pre-order a ticket, the cost is $20.
If you wish to pre-order a gourmet deli lunch for Saturday, the cost is $15.
If you wish to pre-order for both the Friday reception and the Saturday gourmet deli lunch, the cost is $35.
What’s the refund policy?
No refunds are available for the Friday reception or Saturday boxed lunch tickets.
What are my transportation/parking options for getting to and from the event?
Georgia State University’s Dunwoody Campus is located approximately 18 miles northeast of Atlanta, at 2101 Womack Rd. Dunwoody, GA 30338. The Dunwoody Campus offers free visitor parking. Certain restrictions apply. Please visit this Parking & Maps page for more information.
The Festival will take place in and around the auditorium located in Building NC on campus, officially known as NC2100.
2018 Festival News
Festival Spotlights Lost Southern Voices | Georgia State University News Release
- Georgia State Literary Festival Showcases ‘Lost’ Southern Writers | Georgia State University News Release
- A Conversation with Gregg Murray, Editor-in-Chief of Atlanta’s “Muse /A” | Arts]ATL
- Ga. Festival Celebrates The ‘Lost’ Southern Authors | WABE 90.1 FM
- Lost Southern Voices Festival Puts Focus on Lesser-Known Writers | Atlanta Journal-Constitution
- Literature at Lunchtime and Lost Southern Authors Are on the Menu this Week for Atlanta Readers | Saporta
- Report Preview: Lost Literary Voices Will Be Revived and Revered this Weekend at GSU | ArtsATL
News
- Georgia State Literary Festival Showcases ‘Lost’ Southern Writers | Georgia State University News Release
- A Conversation with Gregg Murray, Editor-in-Chief of Atlanta’s “Muse /A” | Arts]ATL
- Ga. Festival Celebrates The ‘Lost’ Southern Authors | WABE 90.1 FM
- Lost Southern Voices Festival Puts Focus on Lesser-Known Writers | Atlanta Journal-Constitution
- Literature at Lunchtime and Lost Southern Authors Are on the Menu this Week for Atlanta Readers | Saporta
- Report Preview: Lost Literary Voices Will Be Revived and Revered this Weekend at GSU | ArtsATL
Festival Photos
