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Welcome to the online home of Revival: Lost Southern Voices — a two-day celebration of lost and underappreciated Southern writers. During the 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 for this event.
Our inaugural festival in 2017 was a wonderful success, and we hope to see you at our upcoming festival, April 12-13, 2019, at Georgia State University’s Perimeter College, Building NC, Dunwoody Campus, 2101 Womack Road, in Dunwoody, Ga.
The festival is free and open to the public but we do request registration of attendees. On our registration site, you have the added options of paying to attend Friday’s evening reception at the festival or to purchase lunch for Saturday. The reservation deadline for these two meals is at 4 p.m., Thursday, April 11.
On our registration site, you also may make a donation to support the festival.
Check out our tentative schedule of speakers. We will update and add information as details emerge, so please keep checking back.
Lost Southern Voices is co-directed by Jennifer Colatosti, Pearl McHaney and Andy Rogers.
The festival is supported in part by a grant from the Georgia Humanities Council, in partnership with the Georgia Department of Economic Development through funding from the Georgia General Assembly.
January 22
- Pearl McHaney presenting Caroline Miller
- Jen Colatosti presenting Ernest Gaines
- Andy Rogers presenting Peter Taylor
February 12
- Laura Crawley presenting Florence King
- Stephen Corey presenting Starkey Flythe
- Tim Tarkington presenting Fred Chappell
March 5
- Michele Moore presenting Julia Peterkin
- Tom McHaney presenting George Garrett
- Maryemma Graham presenting Margaret Walker
Schedule
Friday, March 23
12:30 p.m.
12:45 - 1:45 p.m.
- Moderator: Rosemary Cox
- Laura Edmunds-African and Caribbean folklore
- Miriam Udel-Yiddish Writers
- Mickey Dubrow-Steve Stern, Allan Kemp, and Marci Wilcox
2 -3:15 p.m.
- Moderator: Alison Law
- John Williams-Bill Lowery
- Peter McDade-John Croslin
- Bill Ferris-Blues musicians
3:15-3:45 p.m.
- Coffee Break
3:45-4:45 p.m.
- Moderator: Jessica Handler
- Ernest Suarez-James Luther Dickinson
- Ted Geltner-Harry Crews
- William Walsh-Marion Montgomery
5-6 p.m.
- Moderator: Anna Schachner
- Jim Auchmutey-Mrs. Henrietta Stanley Dull
- John Derden-Jacques Futrelle
- Trudier Harris-Delores Phillips
6-7:15 p.m.
- Heavy Hors D’oeuvres Reception — Catered by Alon’s Bakery & Market (wine included)(pre-order to attend)
7:30-9 p.m.
- Moderator: Pearl McHaney
- “‘Jordan is so chilly’: An Encounter with Lillian Smith” by Brenda Bynum
- Lillian Smith Panel Discussion: Craig Amason, Brenda Bynum, Rose Gladney and Lisa Hodgens
Saturday, March 24
8:30-9 a.m.
- Coffee and Pastries
9-9:45 a.m.
- Moderator: Andy Rogers
- Steve Stern — Frank Stanford
- Beth Gylys — Leon Stokesbury
10-11 a.m.
- Moderator: John Holman
- Gwen Harold — Mary Johnston
- Amy Berke — Amélie Rives
- Reggie Abbott — Carman Barnes
11:15 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
- Moderator: Tom McHaney
- Rebecca Harrison — Evelyn Scott
- Eve Hoffman, Michele Moore, Susan Millar Williams — Julia Peterkin
- Laura Crawley — Florence King
1:30-2:30 p.m.
- Moderator: Josh Russell
- Gisele Sigal — James Still
- Elizabeth Crews — Hubert Creekmore
- Walter Biggins — Howard Waldrop
2:45-3:45 p.m.
- Moderator: Tony Grooms
- Jim Clark — Donald Grady Davidson
- Jay Lutz and David Smith — Sherman Adams
- Kenton Rambsy — Edward P. Jones’ short fiction
3:45-4:15 p.m.
- Coffee Break
4:15-5:30 p.m.
- Moderator: Jennifer Colatosti
- Gregg Murray — Lorenzo Thomas
- Judson Mitcham — Seaborn Jones
- Tim Tarkington — Fred Chappell
5:45-6:45 p.m.
- Moderator: Kalin Thomas
- Stephane Dunn — Mildred Taylor
- Michael Diebert — Breece Pancake
- Neil White — Mark Richard
2018 Speakers
Craig Amason
Craig holds a bachelor’s degree in English and a master’s degree in History from Georgia College in Milledgeville, and he earned a Master of Librarianship degree from Emory University. He is married to Amy Amason, who is the Vice President for Institutional Advancement at Piedmont College.
Jim Auchmutey
Jim has also written extensively about food. He has co-authored two cookbooks, is a founding member of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi, and has won awards for his food writing from the James Beard Foundation and the Association of Food Journalists. His next book is a history of barbecue, which he considers a great American art form.
A native Georgian, Jim began his career as an editor for the Presbyterian Church’s denominational magazine. It was there that he learned about Koinonia, the Christian community in southwest Georgia where Habitat for Humanity was born, which became the setting for his first nonfiction narrative book, The Class of ’65: A Student, a Divided Town, and the Long Road to Forgiveness. Jim lives in Atlanta with his wife, Pam, an editor at Emory University.
Amy Berke
Walter Biggins
Brenda Bynum
Jim Clark
Craig Amason
Jim Auchmutey
Amy Berke
Walter Biggins
Brenda Bynum
Jim Clark
Jennifer Colatosti
Elizabeth Crews
John K. Derden
He holds the A.A. from Reinhardt University (1967) and the B.S.Ed. (1969), M.A. (1973), and Ph.D. (1981) degrees from the University of Georgia. He has done additional study and/or attended seminars at Georgia Perimeter College, St. Joseph’s University, Cornell University, Ohio State University, and City University of New York.
Dr. Derden has been active in the community, serving as president of the Emanuel County Historic Preservation Society, a member of the Board of Grantors of the Mill Creek Foundation, a member of the Exchange Club, a founding member of the Emanuel Arts Center, and in numerous capacities at Swainsboro First United Methodist Church.
On the state level, he served a term on the Georgia National Register Review Board and was elected to three terms as the treasurer of the Georgia Association of Historians. He currently serves on the marker review board for Georgia Civil War Heritage Trails, Inc. In a collaborative effort with Georgia Southern University, Dr. Derden also serves as the project historian for the archeological team that has been excavating the site of Camp Lawton, the Confederate military prison located on the site of Magnolia Springs State Park. He has also served as a historical consultant for Oregon Public Broadcasting.
He is married to the former Carolyn Graves, and they have two children, Mark and Melanie, and one grandson.
Mickey Dubrow
William R. Ferris
The former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (1997-2001), Ferris has conducted thousands of interviews with musicians ranging from the famous (B.B. King) to the unrecognized (Parchman Penitentiary inmates working in the fields).
He has written or edited 10 books and created 15 documentary films. He co-edited the massive “Encyclopedia of Southern Culture” (UNC Press, 1989), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His other books include: “Mule Trader: Ray Lum’s Tales of Horses, Mules and Men” (1992), “Local Color” (1982, 1992), “Images of the South: Visits with Eudora Welty and Walker Evans” (1978), “Mississippi Black Folklore: A Research Bibliography and Discography” (1971), “Blues from the Delta” (1970, 1978, 1988), translated into Italian as “Il Blues del Delta” (2011), and “Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues” (2009), translated into French as “Les Voix du Mississippi” (2013). His most recent book, “The South in Color: A Visual Journal,” was published in 2016 by the University of North Carolina Press.
Bill Ferris’ films include “Mississippi Blues” (1983), which was featured at the Cannes Film Festival. He has produced numerous sound recordings and hosted “Highway 61,” a weekly blues program on Mississippi Public Radio for nearly a decade. He also has published his own poetry and short stories.
A native of Vicksburg, Miss., Ferris was the founding director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, where he taught for 18 years. He also taught at Yale University and Jackson State University. A graduate of Davidson College, he received a Ph.D. in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania (1969).
He has won many prestigious honors, including the Charles Frankel Prize in the Humanities, the American Library Association’s Dartmouth Medal, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award, and the W.C. Handy Blues Award. In 1991, Rolling Stone magazine named him among the Top Ten Professors in the United States. He is a Fellow of the American Folklore Society. In 2014, the French translation of Give My Poor Heart Ease won the Coup de Coeur de l’Académie Charles Cros Musiques du Monde prize from Académie Charles Cros in the world music book category, and Ferris received the B. L. C. Wailes Award, given to a Mississippian who has achieved national recognition in the field of history by the Mississippi Historical Society. In 2017, Ferris received the Mississippi Governor’s Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement.
At Carolina, Ferris has been teaching classes on the history of music in the American South and its impact on the region’s history and culture. His students have explored Native American songs, Appalachian folk ballads and Afro-American hymns, spirituals and work chants, and considered a range of forms including blues, country music, gospel, jazz, rock, and rap.
Ted Geltner
Jennifer Colatosti
Elizabeth Crews
John K. Derden
Mickey Dubrow
Wiliam Ferris
Ted Geltner
Anthony Grooms
Jessica Handler
Jessica Handler is the author of Invisible Sisters: A Memoir, and Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss.Her nonfiction has appeared on NPR, in Tin House, Drunken Boat, The Bitter Southerner, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and More Magazine. A founding member of the board of the Decatur Writers Studio in Decatur, Georgia, she teaches creative writing and coordinates the Minor in Writing at Oglethorpe University, and lectures internationally on writing well about trauma. Her debut novel, “The Magnetic Girl,” is forthcoming from Hub City Press in 2019.
Trudier Harris
Rebecca L. Harrison
Jay Lutz
Peter McDade
Anthony Grooms
Jessica Handler
Trudier Harris
Rebecca Harrison
Jay Lutz
Peter McDade
Pearl McHaney
Judson Mitcham
Michele Moore
Her creative nonfiction has been broadcast on Georgia Public Radio and published in the Louisville Review, Habersham Review, ACM (Another Chicago Magazine), Groundwater, and O, Georgia. She has also won awards and grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Kentucky Arts Council, and the Kentucky Chapter of the National Society of Arts and Letters.
Moore’s extensive historical research included interviews with her own family members who worked at the cigar factory, adding a layer of nuance and authenticity to her empowering story of families and friendships forged through struggle, loss, and redemption.
Gregg Murray
Kenton Rambsy
Mark Richard
He attended college at Washington and Lee University. His first book, the short story collection The Ice at the Bottom of the World, won the 1990 PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, GQ, The Paris Review, The Oxford American, Grand Street, Shenandoah, The Quarterly, Equator, and Antaeus.
He is the recipient of the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Whiting Award, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, the Mary Francis Hobson Medal for Arts and Letters, and a National Magazine Award for Fiction. He has been writer-in-residence at the University of California Irvine, University of Mississippi, Arizona State University, the University of the South, Sewanee, and The Writer’s Voice in New York. His journalism has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, Spin, Esquire, George, Detour, Vogue, The Oxford American, and The Southern Review, and he has been a correspondent for the BBC. He was also screenwriter for the film Stop-Loss.
He lives in Los Angeles with his wife Jennifer Allen and their three sons.
Pearl McHaney
Judson Mitcham
Michele Moore
Gregg Murray
Kenton Rambsy
Mark Richard
David Smith
Ernest Suarez
Kalin Thomas
Her writing has also been published in magazines such as Travel & Leisure, Essence and Upscale; and in books such as Embracing the Real World: The Black Woman’s Guide to Life after College and Careers from the Kitchen Table. She is also a writer/photographer for SoulOfAmerica.com, where she profiles African American heritage tourism in the Southeastern U.S.
Kalin is currently writing a book about her travels entitled, DO YOU KNOW SHE’S BLACK? The Journey of CNN’s First Black Travel Reporter. The Baltimore, Maryland native is a graduate of Howard University, and has been listed in Who’s Who of Black America.
Wiliam Walsh
Neil White
His memoir, In the Sanctuary of Outcasts (Morrow/HarperCollins), about the year he lived with the last victims of leprosy in the continental United States has been a SIBA bestseller for four years. In 2010, White won the Outstanding Author of the Year from the Southern Library Association. Barnes & Noble honored White as one of the top three emerging nonfiction authors in America through their “Discover Great New Writers” program. White’s essays have appeared in dozens of literary journals and magazines. He has contributed to The Oxford American, National Geographic and The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.
White serves as editor of the books, The Education of a Lifetime by Robert Khayat, Mississippians and Mississippi’s 100 Greatest Football Players of All Time and The A Game. He is the publisher of Memphians, The Color of Mississippi, Choctaw Gardens, 501 Mississippi Trivia, A Short Ride: Remembering Barry Hannah, Trials of the Earth, Bell on Mississippi Family Law and Samir Husni’s Guide to New Consumer Magazines. He is editor and publisher of the periodicals Life 101, College People, the Going to College series, as well as several textbooks for first-year college students.
He leads an annual workshop — Write and Publish Your Book.
White is married to Deborah Hodges Bell, a law professor at The University of Mississippi. They have three children — Lindsay Bell, Neil White IV, and Maggie White.
Susan Millar Williams
David Smith
Ernest Suarez
Kalin Thomas
William Walsh
Neil White
Susan Millar Williams
John M. Williams
John M. Williams
2019 Speakers
Coming Soon.
2018 Speakers
Craig Amason
Craig holds a bachelor’s degree in English and a master’s degree in History from Georgia College in Milledgeville, and he earned a Master of Librarianship degree from Emory University. He is married to Amy Amason, who is the Vice President for Institutional Advancement at Piedmont College.
Craig Amason
Jim Auchmutey
Jim has also written extensively about food. He has co-authored two cookbooks, is a founding member of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi, and has won awards for his food writing from the James Beard Foundation and the Association of Food Journalists. His next book is a history of barbecue, which he considers a great American art form.
A native Georgian, Jim began his career as an editor for the Presbyterian Church’s denominational magazine. It was there that he learned about Koinonia, the Christian community in southwest Georgia where Habitat for Humanity was born, which became the setting for his first nonfiction narrative book, The Class of ’65: A Student, a Divided Town, and the Long Road to Forgiveness. Jim lives in Atlanta with his wife, Pam, an editor at Emory University.
Jim Auchmutey
Amy Berke
Amy Berke
Walter Biggins
Walter Biggins
Brenda Bynum
Brenda Bynum
Jim Clark
Jim Clark
Elizabeth Crews
Elizabeth Crews
Jennifer Colatosti
Jennifer Colatosti
John K. Derden
He holds the A.A. from Reinhardt University (1967) and the B.S.Ed. (1969), M.A. (1973), and Ph.D. (1981) degrees from the University of Georgia. He has done additional study and/or attended seminars at Georgia Perimeter College, St. Joseph’s University, Cornell University, Ohio State University, and City University of New York.
Dr. Derden has been active in the community, serving as president of the Emanuel County Historic Preservation Society, a member of the Board of Grantors of the Mill Creek Foundation, a member of the Exchange Club, a founding member of the Emanuel Arts Center, and in numerous capacities at Swainsboro First United Methodist Church.
On the state level, he served a term on the Georgia National Register Review Board and was elected to three terms as the treasurer of the Georgia Association of Historians. He currently serves on the marker review board for Georgia Civil War Heritage Trails, Inc. In a collaborative effort with Georgia Southern University, Dr. Derden also serves as the project historian for the archeological team that has been excavating the site of Camp Lawton, the Confederate military prison located on the site of Magnolia Springs State Park. He has also served as a historical consultant for Oregon Public Broadcasting.
He is married to the former Carolyn Graves, and they have two children, Mark and Melanie, and one grandson.
John K. Derden
Mickey Dubrow
Mickey Dubrow
William R. Ferris
The former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (1997-2001), Ferris has conducted thousands of interviews with musicians ranging from the famous (B.B. King) to the unrecognized (Parchman Penitentiary inmates working in the fields).
He has written or edited 10 books and created 15 documentary films. He co-edited the massive “Encyclopedia of Southern Culture” (UNC Press, 1989), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His other books include: “Mule Trader: Ray Lum’s Tales of Horses, Mules and Men” (1992), “Local Color” (1982, 1992), “Images of the South: Visits with Eudora Welty and Walker Evans” (1978), “Mississippi Black Folklore: A Research Bibliography and Discography” (1971), “Blues from the Delta” (1970, 1978, 1988), translated into Italian as “Il Blues del Delta” (2011), and “Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues” (2009), translated into French as “Les Voix du Mississippi” (2013). His most recent book, “The South in Color: A Visual Journal,” was published in 2016 by the University of North Carolina Press.
Bill Ferris’ films include “Mississippi Blues” (1983), which was featured at the Cannes Film Festival. He has produced numerous sound recordings and hosted “Highway 61,” a weekly blues program on Mississippi Public Radio for nearly a decade. He also has published his own poetry and short stories.
A native of Vicksburg, Miss., Ferris was the founding director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, where he taught for 18 years. He also taught at Yale University and Jackson State University. A graduate of Davidson College, he received a Ph.D. in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania (1969).
He has won many prestigious honors, including the Charles Frankel Prize in the Humanities, the American Library Association’s Dartmouth Medal, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award, and the W.C. Handy Blues Award. In 1991, Rolling Stone magazine named him among the Top Ten Professors in the United States. He is a Fellow of the American Folklore Society. In 2014, the French translation of Give My Poor Heart Ease won the Coup de Coeur de l’Académie Charles Cros Musiques du Monde prize from Académie Charles Cros in the world music book category, and Ferris received the B. L. C. Wailes Award, given to a Mississippian who has achieved national recognition in the field of history by the Mississippi Historical Society. In 2017, Ferris received the Mississippi Governor’s Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement.
At Carolina, Ferris has been teaching classes on the history of music in the American South and its impact on the region’s history and culture. His students have explored Native American songs, Appalachian folk ballads and Afro-American hymns, spirituals and work chants, and considered a range of forms including blues, country music, gospel, jazz, rock, and rap.
Wiliam Ferris
Ted Geltner
Ted Geltner
Anthony Grooms
Anthony Grooms
Jessica Handler
Jessica Handler is the author of Invisible Sisters: A Memoir, and Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss.Her nonfiction has appeared on NPR, in Tin House, Drunken Boat, The Bitter Southerner, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and More Magazine. A founding member of the board of the Decatur Writers Studio in Decatur, Georgia, she teaches creative writing and coordinates the Minor in Writing at Oglethorpe University, and lectures internationally on writing well about trauma. Her debut novel, “The Magnetic Girl,” is forthcoming from Hub City Press in 2019.
Jessica Handler
Rebecca L. Harrison
Rebecca Harrison
Trudier Harris
Trudier Harris
Jay Lutz
Jay Lutz
Peter McDade
Peter McDade
Pearl McHaney
Pearl McHaney
Judson Mitcham
Judson Mitcham
Michele Moore
Her creative nonfiction has been broadcast on Georgia Public Radio and published in the Louisville Review, Habersham Review, ACM (Another Chicago Magazine), Groundwater, and O, Georgia. She has also won awards and grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Kentucky Arts Council, and the Kentucky Chapter of the National Society of Arts and Letters.
Moore’s extensive historical research included interviews with her own family members who worked at the cigar factory, adding a layer of nuance and authenticity to her empowering story of families and friendships forged through struggle, loss, and redemption.
Michele Moore
Gregg Murray
Gregg Murray
Kenton Rambsy
Kenton Rambsy
Mark Richard
He attended college at Washington and Lee University. His first book, the short story collection The Ice at the Bottom of the World, won the 1990 PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, GQ, The Paris Review, The Oxford American, Grand Street, Shenandoah, The Quarterly, Equator, and Antaeus.
He is the recipient of the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Whiting Award, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, the Mary Francis Hobson Medal for Arts and Letters, and a National Magazine Award for Fiction. He has been writer-in-residence at the University of California Irvine, University of Mississippi, Arizona State University, the University of the South, Sewanee, and The Writer’s Voice in New York. His journalism has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, Spin, Esquire, George, Detour, Vogue, The Oxford American, and The Southern Review, and he has been a correspondent for the BBC. He was also screenwriter for the film Stop-Loss.
He lives in Los Angeles with his wife Jennifer Allen and their three sons.
Mark Richard
David Smith
David Smith
Ernest Suarez
Ernest Suarez
Kalin Thomas
Her writing has also been published in magazines such as Travel & Leisure, Essence and Upscale; and in books such as Embracing the Real World: The Black Woman’s Guide to Life after College and Careers from the Kitchen Table. She is also a writer/photographer for SoulOfAmerica.com, where she profiles African American heritage tourism in the Southeastern U.S.
Kalin is currently writing a book about her travels entitled, DO YOU KNOW SHE’S BLACK? The Journey of CNN’s First Black Travel Reporter. The Baltimore, Maryland native is a graduate of Howard University, and has been listed in Who’s Who of Black America.
Kalin Thomas
Wiliam Walsh
William Walsh
Susan Millar Williams
Susan Millar Williams
Neil White
His memoir, In the Sanctuary of Outcasts (Morrow/HarperCollins), about the year he lived with the last victims of leprosy in the continental United States has been a SIBA bestseller for four years. In 2010, White won the Outstanding Author of the Year from the Southern Library Association. Barnes & Noble honored White as one of the top three emerging nonfiction authors in America through their “Discover Great New Writers” program. White’s essays have appeared in dozens of literary journals and magazines. He has contributed to The Oxford American, National Geographic and The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.
White serves as editor of the books, The Education of a Lifetime by Robert Khayat, Mississippians and Mississippi’s 100 Greatest Football Players of All Time and The A Game. He is the publisher of Memphians, The Color of Mississippi, Choctaw Gardens, 501 Mississippi Trivia, A Short Ride: Remembering Barry Hannah, Trials of the Earth, Bell on Mississippi Family Law and Samir Husni’s Guide to New Consumer Magazines. He is editor and publisher of the periodicals Life 101, College People, the Going to College series, as well as several textbooks for first-year college students.
He leads an annual workshop — Write and Publish Your Book.
White is married to Deborah Hodges Bell, a law professor at The University of Mississippi. They have three children — Lindsay Bell, Neil White IV, and Maggie White.
Neil White
John M. Williams
John M. Williams
2019 Speakers
Coming Soon.
Lost Southern Voices
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.”
Claudia Emerson was an American poet and was born in Chatham, Virginia. She published five poetry collections during her life—Pharaoh, Pharaoh (1997), Pinion: An Elegy (2002), Late Wife (2005), Figure Studies: Poems (2008), and Secure the Shadow (2012)—and a sixth collection, Impossible Bottle, was published posthumously in 2015. She won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection Late Wife, and was named the Poet Laureate of Virginia in 2008.
JACQUES FUTRELLE (1875-1912)
In the Land of Dreamy Dreams (1981) sold more than 10,000 copies in its first ten months and won immense critical acclaim. Her next collection of stories, Victory over Japan (1984) won the National Book Award. Author of more than twenty books of fiction, poetry, nonfiction Gilchrist studied writing under Eudora Welty at Millsaps College. She teaches creative writing and contemporary literature at the University of Arkansas.
“I was born in a small town in Tennessee- The name Sewanee, so called the University of the South. It was in 1893. My father was a white man. My mother was so called a Negress. So I was looked on as a half-white bastard and so called that by almost everyone that knew me.” Ely Green’s autobiography, posthumously published in 1971 under the title Ely: Too Black, Too White, is now a University of Georgia Press Brown Thrasher book Ely: An Autobiography (2004).
BARRY HANNAH (1942-2010)
Barry Hannah was a novelist and short story writer from Mississippi. He wrote eight novels and five short story collections. He was awarded a Guggenheim, was nominated for the National Book Award, and won the Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction Award. He worked briefly as a writer for the film director Robert Altman. Hannah was the director of the MFA program at the University of Mississippi, where he taught creative writing. He wrote Long, Last, Happy: New and Selected Stories (published posthumously in 2011); Geronimo Rex, and Airships, among other books. Yonder Stands Your Orphan, the title taken from Bob Dylan’s song “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” Hannah’s last novel, was published in 2001.
George Moses Horton began composing poems in his head, speaking them aloud, and “selling” them at the Chapel Hill Farmers Market around 1815. His first poetry collection, The Hope of Liberty (1829), was the first book to be published by an African-American man in the south—and one of the first to publicly protest his slavery in poetry. The Black Bard of North Carolina: George Moses Horton and His Poetry, edited by Joan Sherman includes 62 of the poems from Horton’s three volumes: The Hope of Liberty, Poetical Works (1845), and Naked Genius (1865). Sherman provides an introduction and biographical information that puts Horton in context.
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.”
Lost Southern Voices 2019
Coming Soon.
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.
FAQs
What is the cost to attend Revival: Lost Southern Voices Festival?
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?
Where is the festival, and what are my transportation/parking options for getting to and from the event?
The Festival will take place in and around the auditorium located in Building NC on campus, officially known as NC2100.
FAQs
What is the cost to attend Revival: Lost Southern Voices Festival?
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?
What are my transportation/parking options for getting to and from the event?
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
Revival: Lost Southern Voices Mini-Series,
Decatur Library Auditorium, Decatur
In advance of the festival and in cooperation with the Georgia Center for the Book and Georgia Humanities, a Lost Southern Voices Mini-Series of short readings and discussions will take place at the Decatur Library on three Mondays—January 22, February 12, and March 5—at 7:15. Lost Southern Voices is co-directed by Jennifer Colatosti, Pearl McHaney, and Andy Rogers.
We hope you will start discovering the South’s Lost Voices with us at the Decatur Library.
January 22
- Pearl McHaney presenting Caroline Miller
- Jen Colatosti presenting Ernest Gaines
- Andy Rogers presenting Peter Taylor
February 12
- Laura Crawley presenting Florence King
- Stephen Corey presenting Starkey Flythe
- Tim Tarkington presenting Fred Chappell
March 5
- Michele Moore presenting Julia Peterkin
- Tom McHaney presenting George Garrett
- Maryemma Graham presenting Margaret Walker
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
