Dawn Major reviews “The Best of the Shortest: a Southern Writers Reading Reunion”

Introduction: A year ago, on the weekend before Thanksgiving I travelled from Atlanta to Fairhope with a fellow author and friend, John Williams, to attend the first (and as I’ve been told) the last Southern Writers Reading Reunion. The Best of the Shortest: a Southern Writers Reading Reunion anthology was going to be introduced and […]

Dawn Major in Discussion with Christopher Lowe, author of “Make Some Wretched Fool to Pay”

In Make Some Wretched Fool to Pay (University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press 2023), Christopher Lowe unleashes the dark side of “Friday Night Lights,” alongside its cutthroat recruitment tactics, the commercialization of players, and the dynamics of football family legacies. Set in the Deep South where high school football is the heartbeat of small Southern […]

Dawn Major interviews Raymond L. Atkins, A Southern Bard

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 […]

Dawn Major to present Writers Workshop at Broadleaf Writers Conference

Fairy Tales, Monsters, and More with Bradley Sides, Author of “Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood,” and Dawn Major

From a pond monster called King George to docile dragons and half-shark boys to monsters of the human variety, Bradley Sides’s Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood (Montag Press 2024) puts a new spin on how we view monsters and modern-day mythmaking. Clearly, monsters hold a special place in Sides’s writerly heart because we met […]

“Idiot Men” by Scott Gould

Scott Gould’s newest collection, Idiot Men, provides the stage for wayward characters who make poor choices in life and love against a backdrop of elegant prose. In “Word of the Day” (winner of the 2020 Larry Brown Short Story Award), a long-haul truck driver’s wife flees to Jamaica with her lover, leaving him to babysit her hairless tomcat, […]