The Southern Literary Review celebrates Southern authors and their contributions to American literature. We feature classic writers who have defined Southern literature, and we highlight emerging authors with interviews, profiles, and book reviews. We support independent bookstores. If you subscribe to our newsletter, please add southernliteraryreview@comcast.net to your email contacts list so that the newsletter doesn’t […]
“No Perfect Mothers” by Karen Spears Zacharias
October 15, 2024 by Leave a Comment
Karen Spears Zacharias’s novel No Perfect Mothers imagines the life of Carrie Buck, the plaintiff in the Supreme Court Case upholding the constitutionality of eugenics-inspired, forced sterilization. As Zacharias observes in the acknowledgments, “The book is important at this pivotal time as women seek to reclaim what the Supreme Court has once again taken from […]
Dawn Major interviews Raymond L. Atkins, A Southern Bard
October 15, 2024 by Leave a Comment
Introduction: I was an undergrad at Kennesaw State University when I attended my first poetry reading and had the pleasure of hearing Robert Pinsky read. I can’t recall if he had already served out his term as the U.S. Poet Laureate; Pinsky served as Poet Laureate for three consecutive years, so it may have been […]
“Craft & Current: A manual for magical writing” by Janisse Ray
October 15, 2024 by Leave a Comment
Janisse Ray could have taken the easy way out. She could have produced a manual for writers that offers up her secrets of scene-building, dialogue, narrative tension—the usual stuff. She could have stuck to the basics, and her legion of fans would have eaten up this book, anyway. Ray, however, did not take the easy […]
Jeanne Malmgren
October 14, 2024 by Leave a Comment
Jeanne Malmgren is an author and psychotherapist. For twenty years, she was an award-winning feature writer and editor at the Tampa Bay Times. She co-authored Journey to Mindfulness (Wisdom Publications, 2017), the autobiography of her spiritual teacher. More recently her writing has appeared in literary magazines such as Hippocampus and Streetlight, as well as her […]
Blackened Beauty: A Review of William Woolfitt’s “The Night the Rain Had Nowhere to Go”
October 9, 2024 by Leave a Comment
Every once in a great while, a reader encounters a collection of poetry that leaves a pleasantly gritty residue in the mind. Such is the case with William Woolfitt’s The Night the Rain Had Nowhere to Go (Belle Point Press 2024). In sixty pages, hard labor, stark poverty, tragic history, and environmental dystopia blend with […]
“The Book of Sorrows” by Kenneth Robbins
October 8, 2024 by Leave a Comment
The Book of Sorrows (Southern Arizona Press 2023), by professor, author, and playwright Kenneth Robbins, is a brave and sometimes acerbic retelling of portions of the Old Testament in verse form. Brave, because it must have been a difficult undertaking to recast Old Testament stories as poems with modern sensibilities. Brave also because some readers […]