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.

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.

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.