Joyce Compton Brown’s new collection of poetry, Hard-Packed Clay (Red Hawk Press 2022), takes readers on a downhome kind of journey through Southern cultural territory, with poems radiant with a strong sense of place and filled with exquisite, well-wrought language. Brown—a well-respected poet with many accolades—honors both small town life and rural Southerness with poems […]
August Read of the Month: “Moonrise Over New Jessup” by Jamila Minnicks
August 2, 2023 by 1 Comment
Moonrise Over New Jessup (Algonquin Books 2023) is a beautifully written, thought-provoking novel about courageous people at the cusp of historical changes. It is the debut novel of Jamila Minnicks, a lawyer and writer. Within all its layers of conflict, it rings with authenticity. Set in a fictional all-Black community of New Jessup in Alabama […]
August Books of Special Note
August 1, 2023 by Leave a Comment
Nonfiction: Made from Scratch: Finding Success Without a Recipe (R.H. Boyd Publishing, 2023), an autobiography by entrepreneur Mignon Francois, tells the first-hand story of Francois as she turns her budget for a modest meal into a multi-million-dollar bakery brand. A New Orleans native, François is the descendant of enslaved people on a sugar cane plantation—and sugar […]
“Malone Ridge” by James K. Dill
July 18, 2023 by Leave a Comment
Malone Ridge (Little Star Books 2023) is a well-conceived, well-told tale of spirit triumphing over circumstances. And for Eve Malone, the protagonist, the circumstances are, if not dire, close enough. Born in Nitro, a small West Virginia community in Appalachia, she is living in poverty in a trashy, once-abandoned hunter’s trailer with an outhouse in […]
“Love Letters from an Arsonist” by David van den Berg
June 13, 2023 by 1 Comment
In his compelling, imaginative collection of poetry, Love Letters from an Arsonist (2023), David van den Berg treads through a grand old Southern literary campground of gothic, beauty and brutalism, religiosity, and nature—all in the same works. These are intense poems that cry out to be read and reread and absorbed, verses that will not […]
“Tour of a Lifetime: Glenamaddy to Gomorrah” by Thomas Rabbitt
May 29, 2023 by Leave a Comment
When Thomas Rabbitt’s first acclaimed book of poetry, Exile (1975), won the prestigious Pitt award, he was a relatively young man. At that time, he was charged with starting a Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing program at The University of Alabama, a program he led to national prominence before retiring in 1998. Rabbitt’s […]