Author: Margaret Evans

The South is often misunderstood on the national stage, characterized by its struggles with poverty, education, and racism, yet the region has yielded an abundance of undeniably great literature. In the newly published anthology Southern Writers on Writing, editor Susan Cushman collects 26 writers from across the South whose work celebrates southern culture and shapes the landscape of contemporary southern literature. Contributors hail from Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida.

The 2018 Short Story America Festival and Conference is scheduled for the weekend of September 28-30 in downtown Beaufort. This fifth celebration of short fiction will feature top presenting authors like John Engell (San Francisco, CA), Niles Reddick (University of Memphis), Marjorie Brody (San Antonio, TX), Gregg Cusick (Durham, NC), Nancy Allen (Dallas, TX), John Newlin (Wilmington, DE), James Goertel (Rochester, NY), Ray Morrison (Winston-Salem, NC), and Beaufort-based author and editor Tim Johnston (left).

More than a dozen contributing writers will be on hand to honor Pat Conroy. New York Times best-selling writer Pat Conroy (1945–2016) inspired a worldwide legion of devoted fans numbering in the millions, but none are more loyal to him and more committed to sustaining his literary legacy than the many writers he nurtured over the course of his fifty-year writing life. In sharing their stories in the forthcoming anthology Our Prince of Scribes: Writers Remember Pat Conroy, Pat’s fellow writers honor his memory and advance our shared understanding of his lasting impact on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary life in and well beyond the American South.

A Past That Won’t Rest: Images of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi collects never-before-published photographs taken by Jim Lucas (1944-1980), an exceptional documentary photographer. His black and white images, taken during 1964 through 1968, depict events from the civil rights movement including the search for the missing civil rights workers in Neshoba County, the Meredith March Against Fear, Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s visit to the Mississippi Delta, and more.