NewSouth author Ted Dunagan enjoyed a visit with students from Darlington Middle School for the school's second annual author visit day on August 22. Students read Ted's debut novel A Yellow Watermelon for their required summer reading. Set in 1948, the young adult novel A Yellow Watermelon explores poverty and racial segregation through the eyes of two young boys, one black and one white, who bond while working in the cotton fields and go on to free their town from a corrupt businessman ...
C. S. Fuqua, author of Music Fell on Alabama, offered this remembrance of record producer Jerry Wexler: "Jerry Wexler is known to many around the Shoals as the 'Godfather of Muscle Shoals Music.' Wexler died on August 15, 2008, at age 91 of complications related to congestive heart failure. Had it not been for Wexler, Muscle Shoals may never have become known as the 'Hit Capital of the World'" ...
NewSouth editor-in-chief Randall Williams speaks with host Lori Cummings on Alabama Public Television's Face to Face show on Sunday, August 24. The show will air at 2 pm and 11 pm ...
The online magazine Clapboard House features this month a "flash fiction" story by NewSouth author Gerald Duff. In Duff's story "Win/Place/Show," a teenage boy and his aunt and uncle gamble at a dog-racing track in Arkansas. While the boy longs for Florida, and something else he cannot quite articulate, his aunt spends the afternoon considering her husband's infidelity and the precarious nature of human relationships ...
Southern Living magazine includes NewSouth author Gerald Duff's short story collection Fire Ants as one of the books Texans are reading in their August 2008 issue ...
Rheta Grimsley Johnson, award-winning author of Poor Man's Provence, is just one of many NewSouth authors profiled on the Alabama Center for the Book's This Goodly Land: Alabama's Literary Landscape website. The Alabama Center for the Book's This Goodly Land project features an interactive map where you can search Alabama's vast literary landscape by county or author ...
Loretta Gillespie of The Decatur Daily has reviewed Poor Man's Provence, popular syndicated columnist and NewSouth author Rheta Grimsley Johnson's account of her life in Cajun Louisiana. Gillespie describes Johnson's storytelling as "both humorous and heartwarming" and praises Johnson's evocation of the sights, sounds, and "colorful characters" that pepper this text. Gillespie, too, notes the honest quality of Johnson's narrative.
NewSouth author Warren Trest and former Alabama Governor John Patterson were featured on the Tapestry radio program on May 29, 2008. They spoke about Trest's new biography of Patterson Nobody But the People: The Life and Times of Alabama's Youngest Governor which one reviewer calls "a thoroughly readable and fair-minded account of John Patterson's career, which was one of the most important in Alabama's recent history" ...