Meet the Editors

Donna Meredith is publisher and editor-in-chief. Claire Hamner Matturro, Dawn Major, and Mary Ellen Thompson serve as associate editors. RIGHT: Photographs by VanessaK Photography, LLC.

Welcome!

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 […]

Monroeville Literary Festival: Cassandra King named 2025 Harper Lee Award Recipent

Read of the Month: “Prodigal” by Phyllis Gobbell

Fireworks, fireflies, and gunfire light up Phyllis Gobbell’s exquisite, poignant novel Prodigal (Histria Fiction 2024). This modern retelling of the prodigal son is, above all, a story of love and forgiveness in a Southern family. A Baptist preacher’s son, nineteen-year-old Connor Burdette flees from his hometown of Montpier, Tennessee, after a boy he is with […]

Books of Note: “Can’t Shake the Dust”; “Faulkner, Welty, Wright”; and “Before We Left the Land”

Can’t Shake the Dust Can’t Shake the Dust (Regal House Publishing 2024) by C.H. Hooks employs three points of view to paint a full picture of a dysfunctional family in South Georgia. The alcoholic father and son are obsessed with racing—even though the father lost a leg in a racetrack accident. The recovering addict mother […]

Southern Literary Review Editor Donna Meredith interviews Phyllis Gobbell, author of “Prodigal”

Novel Summary It’s the Fourth of July, 2000. In a small Southern town, fireworks light the sky above the City Park, while down the street a smaller flash of light changes everything for 19-year-old Connor Burdette. He has just lost the girl he loves. Now, buying beer at the Back Home Market, he becomes an […]

Monroeville Literary Festival Feb. 27-March 1, 2025

Where: Monroeville, AL When: February 27 – March 1, 2025 Winners: Cassandra King and Suzanne Hudson! See Monroeville Literary Festival here. 

Submission guidelines for Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel Contemporary Appalachian Literature

Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel Contemporary Appalachian Literature submission guidelines. Their editors are excited about the Volume 28 theme–and hope it inspires your creative interpretations through poetry, short prose, and visual (2D) art.  In this PDF, you’ll  also find instructions related to book reviews, “new books” notifications, and resolution quality of images.