REVIVAL
LOST SOUTHERN VOICES: A FESTIVAL FOR READERS
The next Lost Southern Voices literary festival will take place March 24-27, 2022. Scroll down for details about our kickoff event as well as upcoming virtual events.
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Welcome to the online home of Revival: Lost Southern Voices. Revival: Lost Southern Voices strives to celebrate historically excluded, erased, or marginalized Southern voices. During this annual literary festival, presenters discuss Southern authors or artists whose works are out-of-print or otherwise do not receive the attention they deserve. We invite the public, scholars, students, writers, and inquisitive readers to join the conversation as we continue to discover and recover these Lost Southern Voices.
Revival: Lost Southern Voices will be free and virtual this year, presented by GSU Perimeter College in conjunction with Georgia Center for the Book.
Our 2022 Revival: Lost Southern Voices — A Festival for Readers
Video Sessions of 2021 Lost Southern Voices Festival
Session 1
Session 4
Session 2
Session 5
Session 3
Lost Southern Voices
SHERMAN ADAMS
(1937-1985)
SHERMAN ADAMS (1937-1985)
Sherman Adams was born in Atlanta and immigrated to Sweden in the 1960s, where he became a prominent activist and journalist. His memoir, Mitt Amerika (My America), published in 1980, is still well known in Sweden. It gives an account of Adams’ childhood during Jim Crow. The memoir was published in Swedish from an English manuscript and has also been published in Danish and Russian. Malin Hammar, daughter of Sherman Adams, who was in possession of many of her father’s papers, including an English language draft of Mitt Amerika, and several chapters of its unfinished sequel, “Mitt Sverige” (My Sweden), has made them available for scholarly research. The papers are now housed in the archives of Oglethorpe University. Malin is excited about sharing these papers with scholars, and plans are being made to publish Adams’s writings in English.
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JAMES AGEE
(1909-1955)
James Agee (1909-1955)
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.
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A.R. AMMONS
(1926–2001)
A.R. AMMONS (1926–2001)
Archie Randolph Ammons was born outside Whiteville, North Carolina, on February 18, 1926. He started writing poetry aboard a U. S. Navy destroyer escort in the South Pacific. After completing service in World War II, he attended Wake Forest University and the University of California at Berkeley. He went on to work as an elementary school principal, a real estate salesman, an editor, and an executive in his father’s biological glass company before he began teaching at Cornell University in 1964. Ammons published his first book of poems, Ommateum: With Doxology, in 1955. He went on to publish nearly thirty collections, including Bosh and Flapdoodle (W. W. Norton, 2005); Glare (1997); Garbage (1993), which won the National Book Award and the Library of Congress’s Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry; A Coast of Trees (1981), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry; Sphere (1974), which received the Bollingen Prize; and Collected Poems 1951-1971 (1972), which won the National Book Award. His honors included the Academy’s Wallace Stevens Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Medal, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lived in Ithaca, New York, where he was Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry at Cornell University until his retirement in 1998. Ammons died on February 25, 2001.
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RAYMOND ANDREWS
(1934-1991)
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.
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HARRIETTE ARNOW
(1908 - 1986)
HARRIETTE ARNOW (1908 - 1986)
Harriette Arnow, née Harriette Louisa Simpson, was an American novelist, social historian, short-story writer, and essayist, known primarily for the novel The Dollmaker (1954). Much of her work was inspired by her life growing up in Kentucky. Arnow attended Berea College and the University of Louisville, and taught school and served briefly as an elementary school principal, and before moving to Cincinnati, Ohio, where she was a waitress, a sales clerk, a typist, and, eventually, a writer for the Federal Writers’ Project. Her first novel, Mountain Path (1936), was inspired by her time teaching in Eastern Kentucky. Her second novel, Between the Flowers (published posthumously in 1999), portrays a Kentucky farm family seeking to transcend the troubles brought by nature, society, and their own characters. She married Harold Arnow, a Chicago reporter. Arnow’s next novel, Hunter’s Horn (1949), harked back to Kentucky, though the family moved. In 1950 the Arnows bought a 40-acre farm outside Ann Arbor, Michigan, to which they brought their two children. Four years later she published The Dollmaker. Arnow’s other novels include The Weedkiller’s Daughter (1970) and The Kentucky Trace (1974). In the early 1960s Arnow published two books of social history about the pioneers who settled the Cumberland Plateau (in Kentucky and Tennessee): Seedtime on the Cumberland (1960) and The Flowering of the Cumberland (1963). When Arnow died in 1984, she left behind an unpublished novel about Kentucky during the Civil War.
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WENDY BISHOP
(1953-2003)
WENDY BISHOP (1953-2003)
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).
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LARRY BROWN
(1951-2004)
LARRY BROWN (1951-2004)
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
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ERSKINE CALDWELL
(1903-1987)
ERSKINE CALDWELL (1903-1987)
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).
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ALICE CHILDRESS
(1912-1994)
ALICE CHILDRESS (1912-1994)
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.”
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LUCILLE CLIFTON
(1936 - 2010)
LUCILLE CLIFTON (1936 - 2010)
Lucille Clifton was born in Depew, New York, on June 27, 1936. Her first book of poems, Good Times (Random House, 1969), was rated one of the best books of the year by the New York Times. Clifton remained employed in state and federal government positions until 1971, when she became a writer in residence at Coppin State College in Baltimore, Maryland, where she completed two collections: Good News About the Earth (Random House, 1972) and An Ordinary Woman (Random House, 1974). She was the author of several other collections of poetry, including Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988–2000 (BOA Editions, 2000), which won the National Book Award; Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 (BOA Editions, 1987), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; and Two-Headed Woman (University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), also a Pulitzer Prize nominee as well as the recipient of the University of Massachusetts Press Juniper Prize. Clifton was also the author of Generations: A Memoir (Random House, 1976) and more than sixteen books for children, written expressly for an African-American audience. Her honors include an Emmy Award from the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, a Lannan Literary Award, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Shelley Memorial Award, the YM-YWHA Poetry Center Discovery Award, and the 2007 Ruth Lilly Prize. In 1999, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She served as Poet Laureate for the State of Maryland from 1979 to 1985, and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. After a long battle with cancer, Lucille Clifton died on February 13, 2010, at the age of seventy-three.
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JUDITH ORTIZ COFER
(1952-2016)
JUDITH ORTIZ COFER (1952-2016)
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.
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GUY DAVENPORT
(1927-2005)
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
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DONALD (GRADY) DAVIDSON
(1893-1968)
DONALD (GRADY) DAVIDSON (1893-1968)
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.
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RALPH DENNIS
(1931 - 1988)
RALPH DENNIS (1931 - 1988)
Ralph Dennis is widely considered among crime writers as a master of the genre, denied the recognition he deserved because his twelve Hardman books, which are beloved and highly sought-after collectables now, were poorly packaged in the 1970s by Popular Library as a cheap men’s action-adventure paperbacks with numbered titles. Even so, some top critics noticed that he was producing work as good as John D. MacDonald, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, Dashiell Hammett, and Ross MacDonald. Ralph Dennis wrote three other novels that were published outside of the Hardman series —Atlanta, Deadman’s Game and MacTaggart’s War— but he wasn’t able to reach the wide audience, or gain the critical acclaim, that he deserved during his lifetime. He was born in 1931 in Sumter, South Carolina, and received a masters degree from University of North Carolina, where he later taught film and television writing after serving a stint in the Navy. At the time of his death in 1988, he was working at a bookstore in Atlanta and had a file cabinet full of unpublished novels. Brash Books is re-issuing the entire Hardman series, Dennis’ three other published novels, and his long-lost manuscripts.
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JAMES DICKEY
(1923-1997)
JAMES DICKEY (1923-1997)
Joyce Carol Oates described James Dickey’s perspective as a desire to “to take on his’ own personal history as an analog 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.
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ELLEN DOUGLAS
(1921-2012)
ELLEN DOUGLAS (1921-2012)
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.”
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W.E.B. DUBOIS
(1868 - 1963 )
W.E.B. DUBOIS (1868 - 1963 )
W.E.B. Du Bois, or William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, was an incredibly prolific African-American writer, as well as a teacher, sociologist, historian, editor, and activist, whose work transformed the way that the lives of black citizens were seen in American society. Considered ahead of his time, Du Bois was an early champion of using data to solve social issues for the black community, and his writing–including his groundbreaking collection of essays The Souls of Black Folk (1903)–became required reading in African American studies. He was the most important black protest leader in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. He shared in the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and edited The Crisis, its magazine, from 1910 to 1934. He was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and died in Accra, Ghana, where he moved in 1961 to work on the Encyclopedia Africana, though it would never be completed, and where he later became a citizen.
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HENRY DUMAS
(1934 - 1968)
HENRY DUMAS (1934 - 1968)
Fiction writer and poet Henry Dumas was born in Sweet Home, Arkansas, but moved to Harlem when he was 10. He attended City College in New York before joining the Air Force; he was stationed in San Antonio, Texas, and on the Arabian Peninsula. Dumas attended Rutgers University and worked for a year at IBM, then left the company to teach and direct language workshops at Southern Illinois University. He and his wife, Loretta Ponton, had two sons. Identified with the black power movement during his lifetime, Dumas was also active in the civil rights movement. At the age of 33, Dumas was shot and killed by a New York City Transit policeman in a case of mistaken identity. Eugene Redmond, a fellow teacher at Southern Illinois University, helped to make Dumas’s work available; posthumous collections of Dumas’s poetry include Play Ebony, Play Ivory (1974) and Knees of a Natural Man: The Selected Poetry of Henry Dumas (1989). Dumas’s short stories are collected in Goodbye Sweetwater: New and Selected Stories (1988) and Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas (2003).
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JOHN EHLE
(1925–2018)
JOHN EHLE (1925–2018)
John Ehle, a sixth-generation North Carolinian, grew up on land once used as hunting grounds by the Cherokee. He is the author of 14 highly acclaimed works, including The Free Men and Lion on the Hearth. His novel The Winter People has been made into a major motion picture. He received the North Carolina Award for Literature, the Thomas Wolfe Prize and the Lillian Smith Award for Southern Fiction, and was a five-time winner of the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction. He also received the Mayflower Award, the Governor’s Award for Meritorious Service, and the John Tyler Caldwell Award for the Humanities, and he held honorary doctorates from UNC-Chapel Hill, UNC-Asheville, the North Carolina School of the Arts, and Berea College.
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RALPH ELLISON
(1914 - 1994)
RALPH ELLISON (1914 - 1994)
Ralph Ellison, born on March 1, 1914, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, studied music before moving to New York City and working as a writer. He published his bestselling, acclaimed first novel Invisible Man in 1952; it would be seen as a seminal work on marginalization from an African-American protagonist’s perspective. Ellison’s unfinished novel Juneteenth was published posthumously in 1999. Ellison’s literary legacy continues to be highly pronounced. A massive collection of his essays was released in the fall of 1995 and Flying Home, a collection of short stories was released in the fall of 1996. Scholar Arnold Rampersad wrote a well-received, critical biography on Ellison that was published in 2007. Invisible Man continues to be held up as one of the most highly regarded works in the American literary canon.
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KALI NICOLE GROSS
(1972 - )
KALI NICOLE GROSS (1972 - )
Kali Nicole Gross’s research concentrates on black women’s experiences in the United States criminal justice system between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is the author of the award-winning book, Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910, and the newly released, Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America, winner of the 2017 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction. Dr. Gross’s writing frequently explores how historical legacies of race, gender, and justice shape mass incarceration today. Her short essays and opinion pieces have been featured in BBC News, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, The Root, Warscapes, Ebony, Truthout, New Black Man (In Exile), The American Prospect, and Jet. Dr. Gross has taught a range of students from those in housing projects in New York City to prisoners at the State Correctional Institution-SCI Muncy to students at colleges and universities across the country. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and grants including a Ford Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Lindback Research Grant, and two residencies at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Dr. Gross received her B.A. from Cornell University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.
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JAMES BAKER HALL
(1935 - 2009)
JAMES BAKER HALL (1935 - 2009)
James Baker Hall, significantly known for his work as a writer, was a former Poet Laureate of Kentucky and the author of many essential works of southern literature. He was an equally prolific art photographer, lecturing widely on the medium. He was a former contributing editor for Aperture, and his own work published in over half a dozen collections of photographs. He was a member of the famed Lexington Camera Club and the trusted colleague of such photographers as Minor White, Richard Benson, and Ralph Eugene Meatyard. His photographs are part of public and private art holdings, including the permanent collections of the University of Kentucky Art Museum in Lexington, KY, and 21C Museum in Louisville, KY.
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JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS
(1848 - 1908)
JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS (1848 - 1908)
Joel Chandler Harris is an American author and creator of the folk character Uncle Remus. As an apprentice on a weekly paper, The Countryman, he became familiar with the lore and dialects of the plantation slave. He established a reputation as a brilliant humorist and writer of dialect while employed on newspapers at Macon, Ga., New Orleans, Forsyth and Savannah, Ga., and, after 1876, on the staff of the Atlanta Constitution for 24 years. In 1879 “Tar-Baby,” a story probably inspired by his reading of William Owens’ work on black folklore, appeared in the Atlanta Constitution and created a vogue for a distinctive type of dialect literature. This and successive Uncle Remus stories won for Harris a secure place in American literature. The pattern was new: Uncle Remus, the wise, genial old black man, tells stories about Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and other animals to the little son of a plantation owner and interweaves his philosophy of the world about him. Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings was published in book form in 1880, followed by others. Included in a series of children’s books were: Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country (1894), The Story of Aaron (1896), and Aaron in the Wildwoods (1897). Mingo, and Other Sketches in Black and White (1884); Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches (1887); Sister Jane, Her Friends and Acquaintances (1896); and Gabriel Tolliver (1902) reveal Harris’ ability to vitalize other Southern types and to delve into issues faced by the South after Reconstruction. On the Plantation (1892) is valuable for its autobiography. From 1907 until his death he edited Uncle Remus’s Magazine.
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BLAKE HAUSMAN
(1976- )
BLAKE HAUSMAN (1976 - )
Blake Hausman is a writer, teacher, and musician. He was born in Michigan to a Cherokee mother and Jewish father and grew up in North Carolina and Georgia. He is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, and his ancestors lived near present-day Rome, Georgia, until they were removed on the Trail of Tears. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Georgia, in Athens, where he was inspired by Southern writing. He went to grad school at Western Washington University and UC Berkeley, studying creative writing and Native American literatures. Riding the Trail of Tears (2011) is his first novel.
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ZORA NEALE HURSTON
(1891 - 1960)
ZORA NEALE HURSTON (1891 - 1960)
Zora Neale Hurston, author of Their Eyes Were Watching God, was a novelist, short story writer, and folklorist. Hurston was truly a pioneer of African-American anthropology, studying under Franz Boas and archiving obscure black folklore throughout the southern states. She was also a prolific and accomplished playwright. Every Tongue Got to Confess, a collection of folktales gathered in the 1920s and discovered in the Smithsonian archives, was published posthumously in 2001. The nonfiction work Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” was released in 2018, though originally completed in 1931. Alice Walker’s famous revival of Hurston’s work in the 1970s is the model for the Lost Southern Voices Festival.
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KENNETH IRBY
(1936–2015)
KENNETH IRBY (1936–2015)
Kenneth Irby was born in Bowie, Texas, and raised in Fort Scott, Kansas. He earned a BA from the University of Kansas and an MLS from the University of California–Berkeley and completed PhD work at Harvard University. A friend of Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley, Irby was frequently associated with the Black Mountain School, and his work also shares affinities with Language poetry. His collections include The Oregon Trail (1964), Relation: Poems 1965–1966 (1970), Plank Turned to Marble (1979), A Set (1983), Antiphonal and Fall to Fall (1994), Ridge to Ridge: Poems 1990–2000 (2001), and The Intent On: Collected Poems, 1962–2006 (2009). Irby won the Shelley Memorial Award in 2010. Irby’s importance to midcentury experimental American poetry was clarified by the publication of Intent On. A long-time instructor and professor at the University of Kansas, he lived in Lawrence, Kansas, until his death in 2015.
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GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON
(1880–1966)
GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON(1880–1966)
A member of the Harlem Renaissance, Georgia Douglas Johnson wrote plays, a syndicated newspaper column, and four collections of poetry: The Heart of a Woman (1918), Bronze (1922), An Autumn Love Cycle (1928), and Share My World (1962). Johnson was born in Atlanta, Georgia, to parents of African American, Native American, and English descent. She graduated from Atlanta University Normal College and studied music at the Oberlin Conservatory and the Cleveland College of Music. After graduation, she taught and worked as an assistant principal. In 1910 she moved with her husband to Washington, D.C. When her husband died in 1925, Johnson supported her two sons by working temporary jobs until she was hired by the Department of Labor. Johnson’s house came to be known as site of the S Street Salon, an important meeting place for writers of the Harlem Renaissance in Washington, D.C. Johnson published her first poems in 1916 in the NAACP’s magazine Crisis. Her weekly column, “Homely Philosophy,” was published from 1926 to 1932. She wrote numerous plays, including Blue Blood (performed 1926) and Plumes (performed 1927). Johnson traveled widely in the 1920s to give poetry readings. In 1934 she lost her job in the Department of Labor and returned to supporting herself with temporary clerical work. Johnson received an honorary doctorate in literature from Atlanta University in 1965.
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JAMES WELDON JOHNSON
(1871 - 1938)
JAMES WELDON JOHNSON (1871 - 1938)
Born on June 17, 1871, in Jacksonville, Florida, James Weldon Johnson studied English literature and the European musical tradition and wrote music, poetry, and prose. He attended Atlanta University, and after graduating, he took a job as a high school principal in Jacksonville. In 1900, he wrote the song “Lift Every Voice and Sing” on the occasion of Lincoln’s birthday; the song was immensely popular in the black community, and became known as the “Negro National Anthem.” Johnson moved to New York in 1901 to work with his brother Rosamond, a composer; after attaining some success as a songwriter for Broadway, he decided in 1906 to take a job as a U.S. consul to Venezuela. While employed by the diplomatic corps, Johnson had poems published in The Century Magazine and The Independent. In 1912, Johnson anonymously published his novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (French and Company). Johnson became the national organizer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1920. He edited The Book of American Negro Poetry (Harcourt Brace, 1922). His book of poetry God’s Trombones (Viking Press, 1927) was influenced by his impressions of the rural South. He is the author of several books of poetry and prose.
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SEABORN JONES
(1942-2014)
SEABORN JONES (1942-2014)
Seaborn Jones was born in Macon Georgia in 1942. He served in the United States Marine Corps and attended Mercer University and San Francisco City College. Seaborn held many jobs, working in Pittsburgh for Fred Rogers on the set of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, and in Macon as poet in residence and curator of live collections at the Museum of Arts and Sciences. He taught poetry in a variety of settings, including in the summer arts program at Wesleyan College. Seaborn published poems in numerous literary journals, including New York Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, River Styx, Louisiana Review, and Poetry NZ. His poems were translated into French, and his work was included in several anthologies. He was the author of six books of poetry: Drowning from the Inside out, X-Ray Movies, Black Champagne, Lost Keys (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Poetry Prize from Snake Nation Press), Getaway Car in Reverse, and Going Farther into the Woods Than the Woods Go, winner of the Adrienne Bond Award in Poetry from Mercer University Press. In 1988 he was chosen as Georgia Author of the Year, and in 1991 he was the Alan Collins Scholar in Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Seaborn Jones died in Lizella, Georgia, in October of 2014.
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RANDALL KENAN
(1963-)
RANDALL KENAN (1963-)
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.
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HORACE KEPHART
(1862-1931)
HORACE KEPHART (1862-1931)
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
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SYDNEY LANIER
(1842-1881)
SYDNEY LANIER (1842-1881)
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.
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ROGER MANLEY
( - )
ROGER MANLEY (-)
Roger Manley has been director of NC State University’s Gregg Museum of Art & Design since 2010. Before that, he worked as a photographer, folklorist, filmmaker, curator and writer. He has curated exhibitions for more than forty other institutions, including some of the first exhibitions of outsider art in the South and three blockbuster exhibitions for the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, beginning with its inaugural show, Tree of Life. He has authored a number of award-winning books, catalogs, videos and films, and has produced exhibitions of his own photographs of Australian Aboriginals, Hispanic farmworkers, Palestinian villagers, Gullah Sea Islanders, Navajos, and self-taught artists. His film MANA—beyond belief, a feature-length documentary produced in Paris and co-directed with Peter Friedman, won many awards including Best Cinematography at the Avignon Film Festival and the Grand Jury Prize at Rhodes. Its North American premiere was held at Lincoln Center in New York. Manley has had artist residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts (California), the Foundation d’Art de La Napoule (France), and Mishkenot Sha’ananim (Israel) and was a recipient of both the NEA Artists Fellowship and the NEH Scholars Fellowship. He founded the biennial META Conferences at Black Mountain, which over the past three decades have brought together hundreds of artists, scientists and other creative individuals from all over the world for regular collaborative exchanges at the site of the former Black Mountain College. Manley served on the Jargon Society’s advisory board for several years and, in tandem with Jargon Executive Director Tom Patterson, ran the Society’s Southern Visionary Folk Art Project.
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SHARYN MCCRUMB
(1948 - )
SHARYN MCCRUMB (1948 - )
Sharyn McCrumb is an award-winning Southern writer, best known for her Appalachian “Ballad” novels, set in the North Carolina/Tennessee mountains, including the New York Times Best Sellers: The Ballad of Tom Dooley, She Walks These Hills and The Rosewood Casket. In April 2014, she was awarded the Mary Frances Hobson Prize for Southern Literature by North Carolina’s Chowan University. Named a “Virginia Woman of History” in 2008 for Achievement in Literature, she was a guest author at the National Festival of the Book in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the White House in 2006. St. Dale won a 2006 Library of Virginia Award as well as the AWA Book of the Year Award. Her other best-selling novels include The Ballad of Frankie Silver (new edition, 2013) and Ghost Riders (new edition, 2012), which won the Wilma Dykeman Award for Literature from the East Tennessee Historical Society and the Audie Award for Best Recorded Book. McCrumb’s other honors include AWA Outstanding Contribution to Appalachian Literature Award; the Chaffin Award for Southern Literature; the Plattner Award for Short Story; and AWA’s Best Appalachian Novel. She was recently named “Best Mountain Writer 2013” by Blue Ridge Country Magazine. McCrumb was the first writer-in-residence at King College in Tennessee. In 2005 she honored as the Writer of the Year at Emory & Henry College. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, with an M.A. from Virginia Tech, she lives and writes in the Virginia Blue Ridge.
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CARSON MCCULLERS
(1917 - 1967)
CARSON MCCULLERS (1917 - 1967)
Carson McCullers was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia, on Feb. 19, 1917. Most famous for her novels The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Member of the Wedding, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, and Clock Without Hands. McCullers was also a playwright and a short story writer. Her small but significant body of work includes five novels, two plays, 20 short stories, more than two dozen nonfiction pieces, a book of children’s verse, a number of poems, and an unfinished autobiography. McCullers’ life was blighted by a series of cerebral strokes caused by a misdiagnosed and untreated childhood case of rheumatic fever. The first stroke occurred when she was only 24 years old, and within several years, she was completely paralyzed on her left side. McCullers suffered a final stroke in August 1967 and died at age 50 on Sept. 29, 1967.
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RALPH EMERSON McGILL (1898-1969)
(1898 - 1969)
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.
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CARSON MCCULLERS (1917 - 1967)
Carson McCullers was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia, on Feb. 19, 1917. Most famous for her novels The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Member of the Wedding, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, and Clock Without Hands. McCullers was also a playwright and a short story writer. Her small but significant body of work includes five novels, two plays, 20 short stories, more than two dozen nonfiction pieces, a book of children’s verse, a number of poems, and an unfinished autobiography. McCullers’ life was blighted by a series of cerebral strokes caused by a misdiagnosed and untreated childhood case of rheumatic fever. The first stroke occurred when she was only 24 years old, and within several years, she was completely paralyzed on her left side. McCullers suffered a final stroke in August 1967 and died at age 50 on Sept. 29, 1967.
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Carson McCullers
ALBERT MURRAY (1916 - 2013)
Albert Murray, in full Albert Lee Murray was an African American essayist, critic, and novelist whose writings assert the vitality and the powerful influence of black people in forming American traditions. Murray attended Tuskegee Institute (B.S., 1939; later Tuskegee University) and New York University (M.A., 1948); he also taught at Tuskegee. In 1943 he entered the U.S. Air Force (known then as the U.S. Army Air Forces), from which he retired as a major in 1962. Murray’s first collection of essays, The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture (1970), used historical fact, literature, and music to attack false perceptions of black American life. He recorded his visit to scenes of his segregated boyhood during the 1920s in his second published work, South to a Very Old Place (1971). In Stomping the Blues (1976), Murray maintained that blues and jazz musical styles developed as affirmative responses to misery; he also explored the cultural significance of these music genres and other artistic genres in The Hero and the Blues (1973), The Blue Devils of Nada (1996), and From the Briarpatch File: On Context, Procedure, and American Identity (2001). Murray also cowrote Count Basie’s autobiography, Good Morning Blues (1985), and was active in the creation of the concert series Jazz at Lincoln Center. In addition, he published Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray (2000), a poetry collection, and a tetralogy of novels—Train Whistle Guitar (1974), The Spyglass Tree (1991), The Seven League Boots (1995), and The Magic Keys (2005).
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Albert Murray
MARY NOAILLES MURFREE (1850 - 1922 )
Mary Noailles Murfree, who wrote under the pseudonym Charles Egbert Craddock, was an American writer in the local-colour movement, and most of her stories present the narrow, stern life of the Tennessee mountaineers who were left behind in the advance of civilization. Mary Murfree studied at Chegaray Institute, a French school in Philadelphia, in 1867–69. With the failure of her father’s business in 1869 the family returned to their native Murfreesboro, Tennessee. There Murfree began writing stories. Her first publication was in 1874 when one of her stories appeared in Lippincott’s Magazine under the name “R. Emmet Dembry.” A story in The Atlantic Monthly in 1878 appeared under the name “Charles Egbert Craddock,” which she used thereafter. Murfree’s first book, In the Tennessee Mountains (1884), collects several of her stories from the Atlantic. Where the Battle Was Fought (1884), her first novel, was followed by In the Clouds (1886), The Despot of Broomsedge Cove (1889), In the “Stranger People’s” Country (1891), His Vanished Star (1894), The Juggler (1897), and The Young Mountaineers (1897), among others. The revelation in 1885 of Charles Craddock’s true identity added greatly to Murfree’s celebrity and to interest in her writing. Murfree’s later works are mostly historical fictions.
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Mary Noailles Murfree
LEWIS NORDAN (1939 - 2012 )
Lewis Nordan was born on August 23, 1939, in Forest, Mississippi, but he grew up in Itta Bena, Mississippi. His father Lemuel was a house painter who died when Nordan was 18 months old. He was raised by his stepfather, a letter carrier, and his mother Sara, a school teacher. Nordan received a B.S. degree from Millsaps College, an M.A. from Mississippi State University in Starkville, Mississippi, and a Ph.D. from Auburn University in Alabama. He also served two years in the U.S. Navy. Nordan taught in public schools and colleges throughout the South before arriving at the University of Pittsburgh, where he taught writing for more than twenty years, until he retired in 2005 and moved to Cleveland. He is the author of seven books of fiction, including Music of the Swamp (1992) and Wolf Whistle (2003)—which won the Southern Book Award—and a memoir. His other awards include three American Library Association Notable Book citations, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for fiction, the Mississippi Authors Award for fiction, and the Southern Book Critics Award for fiction. He died in 2012.
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Lewis Nordan
LEE SMITH (1944 -)
Growing up in the Appalachian mountains of southwestern Virginia, nine-year-old Lee Smith was already writing—and selling, for a nickel apiece-—stories about her neighbors in the coal boomtown of Grundy and the nearby isolated “hollers.” She has published eleven novels, as well as three collections of short stories, and has received many writing awards. It was 1966, during her senior year at Hollins, that Smith’s literary career began to take off. She submitted an early draft of a coming-of-age novel to a Book-of-the-Month Club contest and was awarded one of twelve fellowships. Two years later, that novel, The Last Day the Dog Bushes Bloomed (1968), became Smith’s first published work of fiction. By 1971, though, she’d completed her second novel, Something in the Wind, which garnered generally favorable reviews. But her next novel, Fancy Strut (1973), was widely praised by critics as a comic masterpiece. In 1974 Smith finished Black Mountain Breakdown (1981), a much darker work than her readers had come to expect. Because of that, and despite her earlier successes, it took Smith five years to find a publisher for her next novel. She turned her attention to short stories, for which she won O. Henry Awards in 1978 and 1980, and then published Cakewalk (1981), her first collection of stories. In 1983 her fifth novel, Oral History, became a Book-of-the-Month Club featured selection, exposing Smith for the first time to a wide national audience. Her other books include Family Linen (1985), Fair and Tender Ladies (1988), Me and My Baby View the Eclipse (1990)—her second book of short stories, The Devil’s Dream (1992), Saving Grace (1995), and a novella The Christmas Letters (1996). News of the Spirit, a collection of stories and novellas was published in 1997. Smith reached a wider audience with New York Times bestseller The Last Girls (2002). Lee’s memoir, Dimestore, was published in March, 2016.
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Lee Smith
FRANK STANFORD (1948 - 1978 )
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.
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Frank Stanford
T.S. STRIBLING (1881 - 1965)
Thomas Sigismund Stribling was the author of sixteen books, a multitude of articles, and is best known for his novel trilogy that explored political and social injustices, and included The Store, winner of the 1933 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Stribling was born on March 4, 1881, in Clifton, and during the summers spent time with his grandparents on a Lauderdale County, Alabama, family farm, the setting of many of his stories. After graduating high school, he attended Florence Normal School—now known as the University of North Alabama. He became a lawyer and subsequently left that career to move home to Tennessee. He began a life as an author of odd consequence. He wrote for the Chattanooga News, Sunday School magazines, and a popular pulp magazine of the day. He later wrote a column for The Campfire magazine. Stribling began to write novels, beginning with Cruise of the Dry Dock in 1917, and Birthright in 1922, which was eventually made into a feature film. He published East is East in 1922. The novel Fombombo was released in 1923, followed by Red Sand the following year. His readers wanted more. Teeftalow was published in 1926, became a bestseller, and was adapted as the Broadway play, Rope. He published another novel Backwater, in 1930, and then began his most famous trilogy, which included The Forge (1930), The Store (1932), and Unfinished Cathedral (1934). The trilogy was considered by some as unthinkable stories of the South during a time period in which slavery and cotton were as common as trading mules for land. After the successful trilogy, Stribling penned two more novels, Sound Wagon in 1935, and These Bars of Flesh in 1938. Stribling continue writing, traveling, and teaching until he died at age 84. He was the best-selling author of his time, and his trilogy alone sold more than 240,000 copies.
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T.S. Stribling
STEFFEN THOMAS (1906 - 1990)
Steffen Thomas was born in 1906 in Fürth, Germany. His father, a paintbrush manufacturer, apprenticed him to a stonecutter at the age of 14 after realizing his son wanted to be a sculptor. Steffen applied himself and was accepted to the School of Applied Arts in Nuremberg and at the age of 19 entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. While at the Academy he established himself as a sculptor of note, was given his own studio and awarded “Master” status at the age of 21. Thomas paid his own way to America in 1922, and found a job in Palm Beach, Florida. There, he made copies of classical sculptures for the E.F. Hutton Estate (now Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club), until he got bored and started to add his own embellishments. As a result, he was fired, and traveled and moved some before he settled in Atlanta by 1930 and soon became well-known for his sculptures busts of Southern dignitaries. He became an American citizen in 1935 and continued his work as a sculptor, supporting his family by creating busts of famous Americans. In 1941 Thomas bought 50 acres in Stone Mountain, Georgia, where he and his wife raised their four children in a home he built himself—stone by stone. Here, he worked in his studio equipped with a bronze-casting foundry he again built himself and created some of his greatest public sculptures. Thomas continued to accept commissions until 1955 when he was finally able to follow his muse and begin to create the Expressionist art for which he is known.
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Steffen Thomas
MARK TWAIN (1835 - 1910 )
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. Twain was raised in Hannibal, Missouri, which provided the setting for his most famous novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). When Samuel was 12, his father died of pneumonia, and at 13, Samuel left school to become a printer’s apprentice. After two short years, he joined his brother Orion’s newspaper as a printer and editorial assistant. It was here that young Samuel found he enjoyed writing. He later became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before heading west to join Orion in Nevada. Twain began to gain fame when his story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calavaras County” appeared in the New York Saturday Press on November 18, 1865. Twain’s first book, The Innocents Abroad, was published in 1869. He wrote 28 books and numerous short stories, letters and sketches. His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty. Mark Twain passed away on April 21, 1910.
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Mark Twain
MANLY WADE WELLMAN (1903 - 1986)
A versatile, award-winning writer in many genres, Manly Wade Wellman was born in Angola, West Africa, the son of a medical officer. He graduated from what is now Wichita State University, and earned a bachelor of laws degree from Columbia University. He worked for several years as a newspaper reporter before becoming a free-lance writer. He moved to North Carolina in 1947, settling in Chapel Hill because of the resources available at the University of North Carolina. Wellman wrote thirty-five adventure novels for boys, nearly half of them set in North Carolina in the southeastern part of the state, and in the mountains. These include both contemporary mystery/adventure stories and historical novels. Wellman’s adult writings are also a mix of history, biography, folklore, fantasy, mystery, and true murders. Although his work has been called “science fiction,” he successfully blended his varied interests to create a genre now referred to as speculative fiction. Wellman’s numerous works of speculative fiction include his Silver John series, a Martian murder mystery, tales of loathsome alien invaders, and Twice in Time. He wrote 80 books and won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award for nonfiction in 1955, and the North Carolina Award for Literature in 1978. He taught in the Evening College of the University of North Carolina.
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Manly Wade Wellman
AMANDA KYLE WILLIAMS (1957 - 2018)
Amanda Kyle Williams was an American crime writer best known for her Keye Street series that are psychologically complex thrillers. In 2013 The Stranger You Seek was shortlisted for the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award. She also wrote the Madison McGuire series. She contributed to short story collections, wrote small press novels and worked as a a freelance writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She was a house painter, a property manager, a sales rep, a commercial embroiderer, a courier, a VP of manufacturing at a North Georgia textile mill, and owned Latch Key Pets, a pet sitting and dog walking business. She also worked with a PI firm in Atlanta on surveillance operations and became a court-appointed process server.
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Amanda Kyle Williams
JOHNATHON WILLIAMS (1929 - 2008)
Founder of the Jargon Society and publisher of Jargon Press, Jonathan Williams was born in Asheville, North Carolina. He attended St. Albans School in Washington, DC, and then Princeton University before dropping out to attend the Chicago Institute of Design and Black Mountain College. A photographer and graphic artist, his books include An Ear in Bartram’s Tree: Selected Poems, 1957-1967 (1969), Strung Out with Elgar on a Hill (1970), Blues & Roots/Rue & Bluets: A Garland for the Southern Appalachians (1971), The Loco Logodaedalus in Situ (1972), Elite/Elate Poems (1979), and Get Hot or Get Out: A Selection of Poems, 1957-1981 (1982). Associated with the Black Mountain poets, Williams was inspired by the visual arts, music, and the natural world; he experimented with found poetry and at times illustrated his work. His interests included civil rights, Appalachia and the Appalachian Trail, folk arts, and avant-garde poetry. Through the relatively obscure but highly influential Jargon Press, Williams promoted the writings of such poets as Denise Levertov, Lorine Niedecker, Basil Bunting, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, and Louis Zukofsky, as well as the art of outsider artists such as Thornton Dial and Howard Finster. Williams’s publishing selections for Jargon extended to Ernest Mickler’s 1987 bestseller, White Trash Cooking. Williams lived in Scaly Mountain, North Carolina, and spent part of each year in England.
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Johnathon Williams
BRENDA WILKINSON (1946 - )
Brenda Scott Wilkinson was born in 1946 in Moultrie, Georgia. Novels in her young adult trilogy—Ludell (1975); Ludell and Willie (1976), and Ludell’s New York Time (1980)—were awarded the New York Times Book Review Outstanding Children’s Book of the Year and an ALA Best Book for Young Adults and were reviewed in the Christian Science Monitor, Kirkus Reviews, Nation, and The New York Times Book Review. Wilkinson is also the author of the novel Separate, But Not Equal (1987), about six black teenagers abducted when they try to integrate a Georgia high school and several nonfiction books about the Civil Rights Movement, Jesse Jackson, and other heroes. In 2000, she wrote Under the Baobab Tree: Children of Africa for the General Board of Global Missions, United Methodist Church. Wilkinson has been a nominee for the National Book Award and for the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.
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TERRY WHITMORE (1947 - 2007)
Terry Whitmore was born in the Binghampton neighborhood of Memphis, Tennessee, where he maintained close relationships in spite of having lived in Stockholm, Sweden, for the greater part of his life, from 1968 to 2001. In 1967, having volunteered for the U.S. Marine Corps, Whitmore was seriously wounded during the Vietnam War. He received a Purple Heart for his bravery in rescuing a fellow soldier, given to him in person by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Upon learning of his reassignment to combat, Whitmore along with five other American military men, sought asylum in Sweden. He writes (with Richard Weber) about his desertion and the early days of his life in Sweden in Memphis, Nam, Sweden (1971) and other manuscripts which are now unavailable. Whitmore was also an actor, appearing in several Swedish films and in Stig Björkman’s Georgia, Georgia (1972), where he had a major role. In addition, he has appeared in documentaries in both English and Swedish, most notably Terry Whitmore, For Example (1969). Whitmore died in Binghampton in 2007.
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Lost Southern Voices - Archive
CAROLINE MILLER (1903-1992)
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.
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MARION MONTGOMERY (1925-2011)
Marion Montgomery: Marion Montgomery (1925-2011) taught in the English department at the University of Georgia for 33 years. He published three novels, each focusing on conflicts between the Old and the New South. He was a friend of Flannery O’Connor’s after the publication of his first novel, The Wandering of Desire (1962) when she wrote what would become her famous letter stating, “The Southern writer can out write anybody in the country because he has the Bible and a little history. You have more than your share of both and a splendid gift besides.” In addition to fiction, Montgomery was a poet but became more universally known for his literary scholarship on Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate: St. Thomas Aquinas, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Dante, Wordsworth, Flannery O’Connor, Poe, Hawthorne, and Dostoevsky. Originally from Thomaston, GA, he attended the University of Iowa before embarking on his career in Athens. With six books of creative work, it was as an intellectual where Montgomery made his name with nearly 20 volumes, including Why Flannery O’Connor Stayed Home; Why Poe Drank Liquor; Why Hawthorne Was Melancholy; Making The Proper Habit Of Our Being; Hillbilly Thomist: Flannery O’Connor; St. Thomas and the Limits of Art; On Matters Southern: Essays About Literature And Culture, 1964-2000; Men I Have Chosen for Fathers: Literary and Philosophical Passages; With Walker Percy at the Tupperware Party: in Company with Flannery O’Connor, T.S. Eliot, and Others;I and, Possum, and Other Receipts for the Recovery of “Southern” Being.
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ALBERT MURRAY (1916-2013)
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.
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JULIA PETERKIN (1880-1961)
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.
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BYRON HERBERT REECE (1917-1958)
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.
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JOHN RIDGE (1902-1939)
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.
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EVELYN SCOTT (1893-1963)
Born Elsie Dunn in Clarksville, Tennessee, Evelyn Scott was primarily known for her poetry and fiction, though she was also an accomplished essayist who produced criticism, memoirs, children’s fiction, and plays. She traveled widely in the U.S. along with numerous stints abroad to places such as Bermuda, France, Algiers, England, Portugal, and Canada, and enjoyed many literary friendship with writers such as William Carlos Williams and Lola Ridge. Scott was widely acclaimed in the 1920s and 1930s with her first published book of poetry, Precipitations (1920), hailed for its modernist techniques and themes, and her experimental memoir Escapade (1923) noted for its defiance of generic conventions. She is, perhaps, best known for her episodic treatment of the Civil War in The Wave (1929) and for her ground-breaking essay on William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Despite her early acclaim and impressive publication record, which includes two memoirs, eleven novels, and two volumes of poetry, among other work, Evelyn Scott all but disappeared from the literary scene by the 1950s and died in relative obscurity in 1963.
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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.
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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.
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FRANK STANFORD (1948-1978)
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.
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HOWARD WALDROP (1946 - )
Howard Waldrop, born in Houston, Mississippi, is a writer of speculative fiction, primarily in the modes of the short story and the novella. Since 1974, he has published ten short-story collections, including the collections Howard Who? (1986), Night of the Cooters (1990), Heart of Whitenesse (2005), and Horse of a Different Color (2013), as well as the stand-alone novellas Them Bones (1984) and A Dozen Tough Jobs (1989). His story “The Ugly Chickens” won the 1981 Nebula Award for short fiction, and has been anthologized over a dozen times. He has lived in the Austin, Texas, area since the late 1990s.
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MARGARET WALKER (1915-1998)
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.”
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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.
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
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
News Archives
- 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
News Archives
- 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
Photo Archives
