After devoting more than a decade of service to Southern Literary Review, including serving as editor-in-chief and publisher, Allen Mendenhall is stepping down from those roles. Allen has written and published over one hundred of his own book reviews and author interviews on SLR, most recently moving from Q/A print interviews to a video format. […]
“James Dickey: A Literary Life” by Gordon Van Ness
July 8, 2022 by Leave a Comment
For James Dickey, who believed in the “transcendence of the imagination,” as evidenced in a letter to Gore Vidal in 1988—“I make no distinction between fact, fiction, history, reminiscence and fantasy, for the imagination inhabits them all,” —Gordon Van Ness takes on a complex, passionate, revelatory—and often thorny—task in James Dickey: A Literary Life (Mercer […]
“A Literary Life of Sutton E. Griggs: The Man on the Firing Line” by John Cullen Gruesser
July 8, 2022 by Leave a Comment
Thorough research underpins John Cullen Gruesser’s A Literary Life of Sutton E. Griggs (Oxford University Press, 2022)—and every serious student of Black literature will want to read this biography of an important figure in American history. While the book’s main focus is on Griggs’s writings, it also covers his family and his contributions to the […]
“Wish Me Joy, West Virginia” by Valerie Banfield
June 25, 2022 by Leave a Comment
Those who enjoyed Catherine Marshall’s Christy will enjoy the way faith is incorporated into Valerie Banfield’s Wish Me Joy, West Virginia. Those who enjoyed Kim Michele Richardson’s The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek and Donna Everhart’s The Saints of Swallow Hill will like way Banfield delivers the historical aspects of a small town. And anyone […]
Claire Hamner Matturro interviews H. H. Leonards, author of “Rosa Parks Beyond the Bus: Life, Lessons, and Leadership”
June 25, 2022 by Leave a Comment
Rosa Parks (1913-2005) was a Southern Black woman born into the Jim Crow South who became an icon of the civil rights movement after her refusal to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama. Author and friend, H. H. Leonards, writes that with that “one simple act, Mrs. Rosa Parks changed the trajectory of […]
“Song of the Chimney Sweep,” by Tamatha Cain
June 8, 2022 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Donna Meredith The rich musical history of Jacksonville, Florida, provides an appealing backdrop for Tamatha Cain’s debut novel Song of the Chimney Sweep (Orange Blossom Publishing, August 2022). R&B, jazz, and rock stars with Jacksonville roots making appearances include the Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Ray Charles, Ma Rainey, Blind Blake, and James Weldon […]