This Familiar Heart (Winedale Publishing 2024) is a moving and memorable love story about an unlikely couple whose feelings were impassioned and despite any initial hesitancy forged a loving bond that lasted decades. Author Babette Fraser Hale has written a captivating book that doesn’t confine itself to the love she shared with her late husband. […]
“This Familiar Heart: An Improbable Love Story” by Babette Fraser Hale
September 17, 2024 by Leave a Comment
“COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War” by Edda Fields-Black
September 11, 2024 by Leave a Comment
It was Edda Fields-Black’s Op Ed in the NYTimes that led me to COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War (Oxford University Press 2024). In the editorial, she describes how the newly digitized US Civil War Pension Files made it possible for African Americans to find information on their […]
“Ghostwriter: Shakespeare, Literary Landmines, and an Eccentric Patron’s Royal Obsession” by Lawrence Wells
September 10, 2024 by Leave a Comment
Lawrence Wells knows how to tell an entertaining story, and his latest, Ghostwriter: Shakespeare, Literary Landmines, and an Eccentric Patron’s Royal Obsession (University of Mississippi Press 2024), is a humdinger. The manuscript was awarded the 2014 Faulkner-Wisdom Prize for narrative nonfiction at the Words and Music Festival in New Orleans. Even readers who are not […]
“The Pearl Diver’s Daughter” by Michael Blanchard
September 10, 2024 by Leave a Comment
The Pearl Diver’s Daughter (Cloud Mountain Press 2023) by Michael David Blanchard is a collection of gently intellectual and lyrical poems which often question the place in the world for both poetry and for a poet. Filled with evocative sensory details, radiant natural images, and a frequent sense of curiosity and wonder, the poems are […]
Read of the Month: “Ditch Weed” by Rhett DeVane
September 4, 2024 by Leave a Comment
Rhett DeVane’s latest novel, Ditch Weed (Twisted Road 2024), sparkles with her trademark humor and Southernisms. Longtime fans of her Chattahoochee stories will recognize some of the background characters like town busybody Elvina Houston and gay florist Jake Witherspoon, but the novel is a stand-alone. Perched in its heart are the “Purty-much Ruined” runaway teen […]
Donna Meredith interviews Cynthia Newberry Martin, author of “The Art of Her Life”
September 2, 2024 by Leave a Comment
Summary of The Art of Her Life (Vine Leaves Press 2024) At nine years old, on her first visit to a museum, Emily fell in love with Breakfast, a painting by Henri Matisse. Now a single mother, she lives in the world of art and can barely find time for her two daughters, much less for […]