Julie Cantrell of Oxford, Mississippi will take over as Editor-in-Chief of Southern Literary Review beginning June 14, 2010. Julie comes to the job a successful author and editor and we are thrilled to have her on board as a manager with new ideas and lots of enthusiasm.

Julie has worked as a freelance writer for nearly a decade, serving as contributing editor for MOMSense magazine and publishing articles about parenting, education, health, and faith across a wide variety of magazines, newspapers, newsletters, books, and radio spots. Julie is also the author of two children’s books, God Is with Me Through the Day and God Is with Me through the Night (Zondervan, 2009). Her first  novel, Into the Free will be released in 2012.

Contact Julie at julie.cantrell@southernlitreview.com.

Hurston's Autobiography (at Amazon.com)

Eatonville, Florida is commemorating the 50th anniversary of the death of Zora Neale Hurston (see SLR’s bio), and the New York Times has picked up the story.

Eatonville wasn’t just Zora’s hometown, it was also the setting of one of her greatest novels.  In Their Eyes Were Watching God (see SLR’s review), Hurston explains that the town of Eatonville was the first all–African American town to be incorporated after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.  In the novel, Hurston also discusses the Okeechobee Hurricane, or Hurricane San Felipe Segundo—a devastating hurricane that hit Florida in September 1928.  Eatonville is six miles north of Orlando. Every year the town celebrates Hurston’s life and works with the Zora Fest.

In my own new book, An Uncommon Heroine: Jane, Holly, Sula–and More Than 20 Other of the Most Remarkable Women in Literature (available for pre-order), I have featured an excerpt from Chapter 14 of Their Eyes.   I have always found that Janie Crawford, the main character in Their Eyes Were Watching God, was both remarkable and unforgettable — she is an independent woman who realizes that while she wants love, she needs respect more. So, I just had to include her in my own book of memorable women characters in literature.  Hurston is a great example of a southern writer that is so much more than southern.

The New York Times and the Oxford Eagle are reporting that Barry Hannah passed away on March 1.  SLR always liked this quote of his, about the term “southern writer:”

No really good writer could be merely Southern. A fiction writer isn’t provincial, ever. He should be sending back news from the front, news somebody else might not know about and it should be interesting and entertaining.

In an interview with SLR, another talented writer, Cynthia Shearer, described Hannah’s role in her evolution as a writer:

For a lot of years I feared my writing and the reactions it produced in people.  So I’m one of those people who tried to outrun it for a while and then realized in my thirties I’d be a saner person if I just submitted to it. I took Barry Hannah’s fiction course at the end of grad school to try to recover the old wonder at the power of words, and he pretty much started treating me like a writer, talking to me like I was writer, and prodded me to keep going.

Check out our previous profile of Barry Hannah.  Starting today is Oxford’s Conference on the Book, which this year is dedicated to Barry Hannah.

Zora Neale Hurston’s is a novel about people. A fact that can get lost when categorized as African-American fiction, or women’s fiction, and hailed as a great book by a black woman before the Civil Rights Movement took hold. Unlike Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, Hurston didn’t write about black people as they compared to whites—she simply wrote about folks from Eaton Florida and they were black. The kind of people Hurston knew in a land she must have known as well as she she knew her own skin. How else might a writer write about a hurricane and all that led up to it and all that came to bear after it without knowing the land so well. The dialect is written as though it’s poetry.  (more…)

click to buy

Through the Pale Door is a coming of age story set in Columbia, South Carolina. Sarah West, the female protagonist is a recent high school graduate from Marietta, Georgia who packs up and leaves her psychotic mom to live with her dad. He gives her a summer job at the steel mill he manages so she can earn some money before going to Emory in the fall. It doesn’t take long for her to meet and fall in love with Edgewood, a fellow mill worker and artist who secretly paints murals around town and lives in an abandoned jail. (more…)

June 5 -7, 2009     Write in Oxford, Mississippi, the town that William Faulkner made famous. This summer, the University of Mississippi is hosting a three–day summer creative writing workshop in fiction and non fiction. Find out why so many authors live and write here!

The program features everything; workshops, lectures on craft, panel discussions on publishing and acquiring agents, book signings, readings, and fried southern catfish at its finest.

historic print available at Amazon.com

Thomas Wolfe was born in 1900 in Ashville, North Carolina.  His parents split when he was a child and he lived with his mother in a boarding house.  Wolfe’s loneliness was his greatest resource for writing, He rarely saw her as she worked to provide for her children.

He was an avid reader and an excellent student. He attended the University of North Carolina where he wrote plays and performed them.  He graduated in 1920 and went on to earn a master’s degree at Harvard, but had no luck publishing his work. (more…)

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Daniel Woodrell was born, raised and remains in the Missouri Ozarks.  He dropped out of high school and joined the marines when he was seventeen. He later realized that the military was not for him so he returned to civilian life and went to the University of Kansas then on to the prestigious Iowa Writer’s School on a Michener Fellowship. He tried other things, and lived a lot of places, but ultimately decided he had to do what he loved –write. He lives in West Plains, Missouri.

His first novel, Under the Bright Lights drew critics’ praise. Since then he has published several novels including Muscle for the Wing, The Ones You Do, Woe to Live on, Give Us a Kiss: A Country Noir, The Death of Sweet Mister and Winter’s Bones (SLR’s review).

Woodrell coined the phrase “country noir” in an effort to describe the area in which he works.