Savor Southern Literary Gumbo

Songs, stories and characters that flavor literature

May 5-7, 2011 Monroeville, Alabama

14th Annual Alabama Writers Symposium

www.writerssymposium.org Fact Sheet Alabama WHAT: Alabama Writers Symposium Schedule includes discussion sessions, lectures, readings, Writers workshops, receptions, luncheons and other events. WHO: Featured Writers and Scholars: Nancy Anderson, Sonny Symposium Brewer, Alan Brown, Mark Childress, William Cobb, Beth Ann Fennelly, Wayne Flynt, Tom Franklin, Frye Gaillard, Anita Miller Garner, Wayne Greenhaw, John Hafner, Roy Hoffman, Jennifer Horne, Joshilyn Jackson, Watt Key, Michael Knight, Jay Lamar, Jim Murphy, Sena Jeter Naslund, Don Noble, Jeanie Thompson and Jacqueline Allen Trimble.

Harper Lee Award Winner for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer 2011: Winston Groom Literary Gumbo Songs, stories and Eugene Current-Garcia Award Winner for Alabama’s characters that flavor Distinguished Literary Scholar 2011: David Sauer Alabama literature Featured Songwriter: Kathryn Scheldt Featured Artists: Judy Pimperl, Debbie McMickle, Brenda Anderson, Claire McKenzie, James Neal, Megan Scofield, Jane Sellier, Leslie Spradlin, Kimberly Watson, Patti Wilson, May 5-7, 2011 Jo Vickery and Opal Smith Monroeville, Alabama WHEN: Thursday, May 5 – Saturday, May 7, 2011 WHERE: Monroeville, Alabama Events take place on the campus of Alabama Southern Community College, at the Monroeville Community House, and at the Old Courthouse Museum in downtown Monroeville.

HOW: Registration forms can be printed from the website, www.writerssymposium.org, or forms may be requested by contacting Donna Reed, (251) 575-8223/[email protected]. Admission to discussion sessions is free to registered partici- pants, but there is a charge for additional events.

SUPPORTERS: Alabama Southern Community College • George Landegger • Alabama Humanities Foundation • Alabama State Council on the Arts • BankTrust • Alabama Power Foundation • United Bank • Radley’s Fountain Grille

The symposium is a project of the Alabama Center for Literary Arts and is produced in cooperation with the Alabama Writers’ Forum, Association of College English Teachers of Alabama, Auburn University Center for the Arts and Humanities, Monroe County Heritage Museums, and Monroeville/Monroe County Area Chamber of Commerce.

MORE INFO: Call Donna Reed at Alabama Southern, (251) 575-8223 or email [email protected]

Visit the Alabama Writers Symposium online at www.writerssymposium.org Schedule of Events Events will be held on the campus of Alabama Southern Community College, at Alabama the Monroeville Community House and the Old Courthouse Museum in downtown Monroeville. Registration will take place Thursday afternoon and Friday morning at Writers Alabama Southern. In addition to the events listed below, the schedule will include art exhibits, music and booksellers. Symposium Thursday, May 5, 2011 1-5 p.m. Registration & Exhibit of Alabama Artists Location: Nettles Auditorium on the campus of Alabama Southern 1:00 p.m. Golf with President Sykes at Vanity Fair Golf and Tennis Club 1:00 p.m. Historical Downtown Walking Tours 6:30-9:30 p.m. Hospitality Hour and Opening Reception with Mark Childress Location: Monroeville Community House Friday, May 6, 2011 Literary Gumbo 8 a.m.-5:00 p.m. Registration and Literary Coffee House Songs, stories and Location: Nettles Auditorium & Alabama Southern Community College Library 8:30-11:55 a.m. Morning Sessions characters that flavor Location: Nettles Auditorium Alabama literature 8:30-9:00 a.m. Welcome and Opening Convocation 9:00- 9:30 a.m. Tom Franklin with moderator Don Noble 9:35-10:05 a.m. Joshilyn Jackson with moderator Anita Miller Garner 10:10 a.m. Refreshment Break 10:30- 11:00 a.m. Poetry Panel with Jennifer Horne and Beth Ann Fennelly May 5-7, 2011 moderated by Jim Murphy 11:05-11:35 a.m. Watt Key with moderator Nancy Anderson Monroeville, Alabama 12:15-2:00 p.m. Awards Luncheon: Presentation of the Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer 2011 and of the Eugene Current-Garcia Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Literary Scholar 2011 Location: Monroeville Community House 2:30-4:30 p.m. Afternoon Sessions Location: Nettles Auditorium 2:30-3:00 p.m. Harper Lee Award Winner Winston Groom with moderator Jeanie Thompson 3:15- 3:45 p.m. Book signing 3:50-4:20 p.m. Bill Cobb with moderator Alan Brown 4:30-5:00 p.m. Wayne Greenhaw with moderator Wayne Flynt 5:00- 5:30 p.m. Frye Gaillard and Kathryn Scheldt with moderator Jacqueline Trimble 5:35-6:50 p.m. Picnic on the Monroeville Courthouse lawn Concurrent Sessions: 7:00-9:00 p.m. Live performance of 7:00-8:30 p.m. Reader’s Theatre at the Hole in the Wall art studio 8:30-11:00 p.m. “Light Jazz and Heavy Conversation” at Beehive Coffee and Books Saturday, May 7, 2011 8:30 -10:30 a.m. Light Refreshments and Morning Sessions at the Old Courthouse Museum in Downtown Monroeville 8:45-9:15 a.m. Michael Knight with moderator Jay Lamar 9:30-10:30 a.m. Former Harper Lee Award Winner Sena Jeter Naslund with moderator Roy Hoffman 10:45-12:30 p.m. Concluding Brunch featuring Sonny Brewer moderated by John Hafner at the Monroeville Community House Press Release Alabama The Alabama Writers Symposium celebrates its fourteenth anniversary in Monroeville, Alabama Thursday, May 5 through Saturday, May 7, 2011. This year’s Writers symposium explores the theme Literary Gumbo, showcasing a slate of writers, poets, artists, and musicians who produce songs, stories and characters that flavor Symposium Alabama literature. Some of Alabama’s most celebrated writers and scholars will lead discussion sessions, readings and workshops. Writers and scholars participating in the event include Mark Childress, Winston Groom, Sonny Brewer, William Cobb, Beth Ann Fennelly, Tom Franklin, Frye Gaillard, Wayne Greenhaw, Sena Jeter Naslund, Roy Literary Gumbo Hoffman, Jennifer Horne, Joshilyn Jackson, Watt Key, Michael Knight, Kathryn Songs, stories and Scheldt, David Sauer, Nancy Anderson, Alan Brown, Wayne Flynt, Anita Miller characters that flavor Garner, John Hafner, Jay Lamar, Jim Murphy, Don Noble, Jeanie Thompson and Alabama literature Jacqueline Allen Trimble. Registration begins Thursday, May 5 at 1 p.m. in Nettles Auditorium on the campus of Alabama Southern. New events on Thursday’s schedule include Golf with May 5-7, 2011 President Sykes at the Vanity Fair Golf and Tennis Club and Historic Walking Tours in Monroeville, Alabama Downtown Monroeville. Thursday evening’s opening reception at the Monroeville Community House features Monroeville native Mark Childress. Currently promoting his new book Georgia Bottoms, Childress is the author of seven novels and the screenwriter for Crazy in Alabama, the Columbia Pictures’ film based on his best-seller Crazy in Alabama. His novel Tender was selected one of the Ten Best Novels of 1990 and was a national best-seller. Childress has also received a Distinguished Alumni Award and the Thomas Wolfe Award from the . Friday’s events include readings in Nettles Auditorium by Winston Groom, Tom Franklin, Joshilyn Jackson, Jennifer Horne, Beth Ann Fennelly, Watt Key, Bill Cobb, Wayne Greenhaw and Frye Gaillard. Also on Friday participants can attend a picnic on the Old Courthouse Museum lawn; a community theatre production of To Kill A Mockingbird; and an afternoon performance by Alabama singer/songwriter Kathryn Scheldt. The Friday luncheon features the presentation of the Harper Lee Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer 2011 to writer Winston Groom and the Eugene Current-Garcia Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Literary Scholar 2011 to David Sauer. The awards are made possible through a generous grant from George F. Landegger.

continued on next page Press Release Alabama Saturday morning’s schedule includes readings by Michael Knight and former Harper Lee Award Winner Sena Jeter Naslund. The program will conclude Writers with a brunch featuring Sonny Brewer. All events take place in Monroeville, Alabama. In 1997, the Alabama Symposium legislature designated Monroeville and Monroe County as the Literary Capital of Alabama in recognition of the region’s remarkable literary heritage. Among the writers who at one time or another have called Monroeville and Monroe County home are , author of such classics as In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany’s; Harper Lee, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill A Mock- Literary Gumbo ingbird; Mark Childress, author of seven novels including the bestselling Crazy in Songs, stories and Alabama; and Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial page editor Cynthia Tucker. characters that flavor Admission to discussion sessions is free to all registered participants, but Alabama literature there is a charge for other events. Tickets are limited for the Thursday “Evening with Mark Childress,” the Friday Awards luncheon, the live performance of To Kill A Mockingbird, and the Saturday brunch, so participants are encouraged to register by May 5-7, 2011 April 21. The symposium is a project of the Alabama Center for Literary Arts and Monroeville, Alabama is sponsored by Alabama Southern Community College. Symposium supporters include George Landegger; Alabama Humanities Foundation; Alabama State Coun- cil on the Arts; BankTrust; Alabama Power Foundation; United Bank; and Radley’s Fountain Grille. The symposium is produced in cooperation with Alabama Writers’ Forum; Association of College English Teachers of Alabama; Auburn University Center for the Arts and Humanities; Monroe County Heritage Museums; and the Monroeville/Monroe County Area Chamber of Commerce. Visit the Alabama Writers Symposium website, www.writerssymposium.org, for schedule updates, registration forms and hotel information. For more informa- tion please call Donna Reed, (251) 575-8223 or email [email protected].

Press Release • page 2 Writers & Scholars Alabama Nancy Anderson is an associate professor of English at Auburn University Mont- gomery. She has published numerous articles in scholarly journals, newspapers, and book reviews. She has extensive experience in public programs and serves on the Writers Alabama Humanities Foundation Speakers’ Bureau and its summer workshops, AHF SUPER. She has participated in Read Alabama! and Writing Our Lives. She is the 2006 winner of the Eugene Current-Garcia Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Liter- Symposium ary Scholar.

Sonny Brewer is the author of the novels, The Poet of Tolstoy Park, A Sound Like Thunder, Cormac - The Tale of a Dog Gone Missing, and The Widow and the Tree. Brewer also edited the anthology series Stories from the Blue Moon Café and Don’t Quit Your Day Job: Acclaimed Authors and the Day Jobs They Quit. He founded Over the Transom Bookstore in Fairhope and its annual literary conference, Southern Writers Reading. He is also founder of the non-profit Fairhope Center for Writing Literary Gumbo Arts. Songs, stories and Alan Brown, professor of English at the University of West Alabama, has pub- characters that flavor lished and lectured extensively in the field of American literature, including articles Alabama literature on Edgar Allan Poe, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright. He has also taught several summer seminars for the Alabama Humanities Foundation. For the past few years, Dr. Brown’s interest in Southern folklore has manifested itself in several collections of Southern ghost stories, including The Face in the Window and Other Alabama Ghostlore, Shadows and Cypress, Haunted Places in the American South, Stories May 5-7, 2011 from the Haunted South, Ghost Hunters of the South, Haunted Georgia, Haunted Monroeville, Alabama Kentucky, Haunted Birmingham, Haunted Vicksburg, and Haunted Natchez. Monroeville, Alabama’s own Mark Childress is the author of seven novels and the screenwriter for Crazy in Alabama, the Columbia Pictures’ film based on his best- seller Crazy in Alabama. His novel Tender was selected one of the Ten Best Novels of 1990 and was a national bestseller. Mark Childress has also received a Distinguished Alumni Award and the Thomas Wolfe Award from the University of Alabama. His most recent work is Georgia Bottoms.

William Cobb has written six critically acclaimed novels: Coming of Age at the Y, The Hermit King, A Walk Through Fire, Harry Reunited, A Spring of Souls and Wings of Morning. His collection of short stories is Somewhere in All This Green. He was writer-in-residence at the University of Montevallo and was the 2007 winner of the Harper Lee Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer.

A graduate of the University of Notre Dame, the University of Arkansas and the Uni- versity of Wisconsin, Beth Ann Fennelly is a professor in the English Department at the University of . Her publications are Open House, Unmentionables, and Tender Hooks. Fennelly’s poems have also appeared in numerous anthologies includ- ing Best American Poetry, Best American Erotic Poems, and Contemporary American Poetry. She has read poetry at the Library of Congress at the invitation of the U.S. Poet Laureate.

A member of the Alabama Academy of Honor (100 Living Alabamians), Wayne Flynt has received numerous awards and accolades in his literary and academic career. Two of his books have been nominated for Pulitzer Prizes, and one book for the Lillian Smith Award for non-fiction. He has taught more than 6,000 undergradu- ate students, and he has served as guest lecturer in universities across America as well as in England, the Netherlands, Austria, Northern Ireland, Hong Kong, India, and the People’s Republic of China. He is the author of the acclaimed Alabama in the Twentieth Century.

continued on next page Writers & Scholars Alabama A native of Dickinson, Alabama, Tom Franklin is the author of Poachers: Stories, Hell at the Breech, and Smonk. He was also presented with a 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship and the John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence, 2001- 2002 at the Writers University of Mississippi. Currently he teaches in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program and lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife, the poet Beth Ann Fennelly, Symposium and their children. His latest novel is Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter. Frye Gaillard, writer in residence at the University of South Alabama, has written or edited more than twenty books, including Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement That Changed America, winner of the 2005 Lillian Smith Award for best southern non-fiction, and the 2007 non-fiction Book of the Year recognition from the Alabama Library Association. His latest books are In the Path of the Storms: Bayou La Batre, Coden and the Alabama Coast, which is currently being made into a documentary by Alabama Public Television, and With Music and Justice for All: Literary Gumbo Some Southerners and Their Passions. He has also written a biography, Prophet Songs, stories and from Plains: Jimmy Carter and His Legacy. characters that flavor Anita Miller Garner, Associate Professor of English at the U of North Alabama, Alabama literature teaches classes in creative writing and Southern literature. She publishes criticism about Southern women writers, and she writes about Southern culture at www. amgarner.blogspot.com and www.amgarner.com. Undeniable Truths is her most recent collection of short fiction.

May 5-7, 2011 Fighting the Devil in Dixie: How Civil Rights Activists Took on the in Alabama is the 22nd and latest book by Wayne Greenhaw, 2006 winner of the Monroeville, Alabama Harper Lee Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer. Other works include The Thunder of Angles: The and the People Who Broke the Back of Jim Crow, King of Country, and Ghosts on the Road: Poems of Alabama, Mexico, and Beyond. In 2005 Greenhaw was recipient of the Clarence Carson Award for Nonfiction given by the University of Alabama’s College of Communica- tion.

John Hafner is Professor Emeritus of English at Spring Hill College in Mobile. He has taught at University and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Pub- lications include short stories, poems, travel articles, and reviews of contemporary fiction, as well as numerous scholarly articles. He is co-editor, with Sue Walker and Mary Riser, of Literary Mobile. He is the recipient of the 2009 Eugene Current-Garcia Award.

Roy Hoffman is a novelist and journalist whose new book is Alabama Afternoons: Profiles and Conversations. He is also author of Back Home: Jour- neys Through Mobile, the novels Almost Family and Chicken Dreaming Corn, and personal essays reprinted in several anthologies, including “More New York Stories: The Best of the City Section of .” He is a staff writer for the Mobile Press-Register, has contributed to the New York Times Book Review, Oxford- American, and Fortune, and teaches fiction and creative non-fiction in the Spalding brief-residency MFA in Writing Program.

Writers & Scholars • page 2 Writers & Scholars Alabama Jennifer Horne is the author of a collection of poems, Bottle Tree (2010), the editor of Working the Dirt: An Anthology of Southern Poets (2003), and co-editor, with Wendy Reed, of All Out of Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality (2006) and Writers About Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality (forthcoming 2012) . She has received an Alabama State Council on the Arts Literature Fellowship and has been a Seaside Symposium Institute “Escape to Create” artist in residence. She currently teaches in the Univer- sity of Alabama Honors College.

Joshilyn Jackson is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Backseat Saints and The Girl Who Stopped Swimming. Her first two novels,Gods in Alabama and Between, Georgia were #1 Book Sense Picks, making her the first author ever to receive that honor in back-to-back years. A former actor, Jackson is also the award winning reader of her work’s audio versions. Her novels have been translated into ten languages. In her own words, she lives in Georgia with her husband, their two Literary Gumbo children, and “way too many feckless animals.” Her next novel, A Grown-Up Kind Songs, stories and of Pretty, is forthcoming from GCP in January of 2012 characters that flavor Watt Key lives in Mobile, Alabama, with his wife and three children. He grew up Alabama literature in Point Clear, Alabama where he spent his childhood fishing and hunting around Mobile Bay. His first novel, Alabama Moon, won the E. B. White Read-Aloud Award, SIBA Young Adult Novel Award, and was nominated for numerous state book awards, including Alabama, which it won. It has been translated into seven languages and in 2009 was made into a feature film starring John Goodman and May 5-7, 2011 Clint Howard. His latest work, Dirt Road Home, was published in the summer of 2010 and continues the story begun in Alabama Moon. In addition to his novels, Monroeville, Alabama Watt writes screenplays and periodically publishes children’s stories with Scholastic Magazine.

Michael Knight, Mobile native and Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Tennessee’s creative writing program has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Esquire, and Oxford American. He has written two story col- lections, Dogfight and Other Stories and Goodnight, Nobody, and two novellas in- cluded in The Holiday Season. His second book was the novel Divining Rod. In 2010 he released a new novel, The Typist, set in post World War II Japan.

Jay Lamar serves as director of the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts & Humanities for the Auburn University College of Liberal Arts. She has produced and managed significant statewide outreach programs in the arts and humanities, including four National Endowment for the Humanities statewide reading-discussion programs and numerous series and stand-alone programs. As writer and editor, her latest works include The Remembered Gate: Memoirs by Alabama Writers and Alabama Our State, a widely adopted fourth-grade Alabama history text.

Jim Murphy teaches creative writing at the University of Montevallo, where he also directs the Montevallo Literary Festival and chairs the Department of English and Foreign Languages. His chapbook, The Memphis Sun (Kent State UP), won the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Award, and his first full-length collection, Heaven Overland, is available from Kennesaw State UP. His poems have appeared in or are forth- coming in Brooklyn Review, Cimarron Review, Gulf Coast, Painted Bride Quarterly, Mississippi Review, Puerto del Sol, Southern Poetry Review, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly and other journals.

Writers & Scholars • page 3 Writers & Scholars Alabama Winner of the Harper Lee Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer (2001) and Bir- mingham native, Sena Jeter Naslund has just published a new work, Adam & Eve, a story set in the year 2020. Her earlier works include Ahab’s Wife and Four Spirits. Writers She is currently writer in residence at the University of Louisville and is the Program Director of the brief-residency MFA in Writing at Spalding University, in Louisville. Symposium She is editor of the literary magazine The Louisville Review, which she founded in 1976. She has served as Visiting Eminent Scholar at the University of Alabama- Huntsville in 2008 and 2010 and as Pascal Vacca Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Montevallo.

Don Noble is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Alabama, host of Alabama Public Television’s author interview program Bookmark and book reviewer for Alabama Public Radio’s Alabama Bound. He won an Emmy for Outstanding Collaboration Achievement in Writing from the Atlanta Chapter of the National Literary Gumbo Association of Television Arts and Sciences with Brent Davis for a document film Songs, stories and on Alabama writer William Bradford Huie. He is the recipient of the 2000 Eugene characters that flavor Current-Garcia Award. Alabama literature Kathryn Scheldt is from a family deeply rooted in the Mobile area, where she resides on the Alabama Gulf Coast. After growing up in Camden, SC, she studied classical guitar under Grammy Award winning artist David Russell, and earned her Masters of Music Performance in Guitar and Voice from Winthrop University. She is the author of two guitar songbooks published by Mel Bay Publications and has been May 5-7, 2011 on the music faculty at Queens University, Wingate University, and the University of South Alabama. Now a solo recording artist for Lamon Records in Nashville, she re- Monroeville, Alabama ceived nationwide airplay on her 2009 CD, “Southern Girl.” Her latest CD, “South- ern Wind,” consisting of 14 original songs, was released in October 2010.

Jeanie Thompson, an Alabama native and founding director of the Alabama Writ- ers’ Forum, has published four collections of poetry, the most recent being The Sea- sons Bear Us (River City Publishing, 2009). Her second collection, Witness, won the Benjamin Franklin Award. She is co-editor of The Remembered Gate: Memoirs of Alabama Writers. She has received literature fellowships from the Council on the Arts and The Alabama State Council on the Arts, and in 2003 the Univer- sity of Alabama College of Arts and Sciences named her Alumni Artist of the Year. Thompson is a poetry faculty member in the Spalding University brief-residency MFA Writing Program in Louisville, KY. Her current project is a book-length persona poem sequence on the adult life of Helen Keller.

Jacqueline Allen Trimble is associate professor of English and the chairperson of Language and Literature at Huntingdon College. She has won several teaching and writing awards, including the Exemplary Teacher Award, the Todd Award for Out- standing Teaching, the Julia Lightfoot Sellers Award, and the University of Alabama’s Outstanding Dissertation of the Year Award.

Writers & Scholars • page 4 2011 Alabama Writers Symposium Registration Form Registration Deadline Thursday, April 21, 2011 Mail completed registration form to: Alabama Writers Symposium Alabama Southern Community College • P.O. Box 2000 • Monroeville, AL 36461 For more information call Donna Reed (251) 575-8223/ Fax: (251) 575-5356 email: [email protected] Visit our website at www.writerssymposium.org for symposium updates

Name______2011 REGISTRATION FEES Fees are listed per person Business Name______o Comprehensive Ticket • May 5-7...... $155 Includes all meals and events except Address______To Kill a Mockingbird play on May 6 o Thursday Ticket • May 5...... $50 Includes reception and “An Evening with City ______State ______Zip______Mark Childress” o Golf with President Sykes • May 5...... $40 Daytime Phone______18 holes and golf cart for one person

o Golf with President Sykes • May 5...... $22.50 Email______9 holes and golf cart for one person

o Friday Ticket • May 6...... $70 Includes awards luncheon, picnic and more Admission to discussion sessions is free to all registered participants; however there is a charge for other events. You will receive registration confirmation in the mail. The schedule of events is o Saturday Ticket • May 7...... $50 subject to change without notice. Registration fees are non-refundable. Includes brunch o To Kill a Mockingbird ticket...... $35 PAYMENT METHOD Friday, May 6 only o Check enclosed payable to Alabama Writers Symposium or o Discussions only...... FREE o Please bill my o VISA or o Mastercard PLEASE NOTE: To Kill a Mockingbird tickets are limited. First priority will be given to those who Card #______exp. date______purchase comprehensive tickets. Please register early! Total Registration...... $______Signature of card holder______

Accommodations in Monroeville Monroeville is easily accessible from Interstate 65 and Highway 84. The hotels listed are conveniently located on Highway 21. For reservations, please call the hotels directly.

The following hotels will hold a block of rooms: n Best Western • (251) 575-9999 $65.95 plus tax for king or double queen rooms n Days Inn • (251) 743-3297 $65.95 plus tax for king or double queen rooms n Monroeville Inn • (251) 575-3312 $40 plus tax for double rooms n Holiday Inn Express • (251) 743-3333 $90.95 plus tax for king or double queen rooms 2011 Harper Lee Award Alabama for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer The Harper Lee Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Writers Writer is awarded each year at the Alabama Writers Symposium, hosted by Alabama Southern Community College in Monroeville. The annual award recognizes Symposium the lifetime achievement of a writer who was born in Alabama or whose literary career developed in the state. The recipient is selected through a process coordinated by the Alabama Writers’ Forum, a statewide literary arts organization founded in appreciation of Alabama’s strong literary heritage with a commitment to its continuation. The Forum is funded by the Alabama State Council on the Arts.

Literary Gumbo Name of the Award: Harper Lee is the author of one of the best-loved classics of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird. The novel explores with rich humor and unswerving Songs, stories and honesty the irrationality of adult attitudes toward race and class in the Deep characters that flavor South of the 1930s. Since its publication in 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages and sold over thirty million copies Alabama literature worldwide. Harper Lee was born in 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama; she attended local schools and the University of Alabama. She has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, several honorary degrees, and many other literary awards. May 5-7, 2011 Criteria for Selection: The recipient of the annual award must be a writer of national reputation whose work has been recognized by critics, publishers and Monroeville, Alabama editors as clearly superior. Evidence of such may be publications in major magazines and literary journals and books published with major houses or reputable smaller literary presses. In addition, the recipient should have received awards, prizes and other accolades from recognized experts in the field of literary arts. Those eligible for consideration are native Alabamians whose literary careers have developed in Alabama or elsewhere or those not originally from Alabama whose literary careers have developed in Alabama. Only living writers are eligible.

Presentation of the Award: Presentation of the award will be made by the Executive Director of the Alabama Council on the Arts or his/her designee. The Council presents the award as Alabama’s principal advocate of literary arts.

Corporate Benefactor: This annual award includes a $5,000 cash prize and The Clock Tower Bronze by Frank Fleming. This award is funded by George F. Landegger. Winston Groom

Recipient of the Harper Lee Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer 2011

Winston Groom took the publishing world by storm when his 1986 novel Forrest Gump flew to the top of the New York Times bestseller list and stayed there for 21 weeks. It has sold over 2.5 million copies in the United States alone, and millions more worldwide, on the heels of its blockbuster movie adaptation starring Tom Hanks. The book has also been reprinted in at least thirteen countries.

Born in 1943, Groom grew up in Mobile, Alabama, where he attended University Military School prep. In 1965 he graduated from the University of Alabama with an AB in English and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Army. He served in Vietnam with the Fourth Infantry Division from July 1966 to September 1967 when he was honorably photo credit: Carolina Groom Carolina photo credit: discharged with the rank of Captain. He then spent the next eight years working as a reporter and columnist for the Washington Star before becoming a full-time author. He holds several honorary Ph.D. degrees as a “Doctor of Humane Letters.”

Groom is the author of fourteen books. In addition to Forrest Gump and Gump & Co., Groom’s novels include Better Times Than These, Gone the Sun, Only and the award-winning As Summers Die, which was made into a movie starring Bette Davis, He is also the author of Conversations with the Enemy, a non-fiction account of the experience of an American prisoner of war in Vietnam, a brilliantly rendered Pulitzer Prize finalist. His novel Such a Pretty, Pretty Girl, was published by Random House in the spring of 1999. He has also written The Crimson Tide, a one hundred year history of Alabama Football, which he is currently updating. He has just completed a history of the Civil War Battle of Vicksburg to be published in the Spring of 2009.

As well as being a talented novelist, Groom is also a renowned author of history. One of his books, the prize-winning Shrouds of Glory, published by Grove-Atlantic Press, is “a meticulous, atmospheric history of the little known, but very dramatic, Western Campaign of the Civil War” inspired by tales of his great-grandfather who fought for the Confederate Army. His criti- cally acclaimed A Storm in Flanders, a World War I history, was published by Grove-Atlantic in June of 2002. His World War II history book, 1942: The Year That Tried Men’s Souls, was published by Grove in the spring of 2005. Patriotic Fire, his history of Andrew Jackson and Jean Lafitte at the Battle of New Orleans was published by Knopf in the Spring of 2006 to widespread critical accolades. That same year he was the recipient of the University of Alabama’s coveted Clarence Cason Award for excel- lence in Journalism. His latest book is Vicksburg 1863, Kearny’s March. The Epic Creation of the American West 1846-1848 is a new history book to be published this fall by Knopf.

Groom has written for numerous publications, including Smithsonian, Southern Living, Conde Nast Traveler, Newsweek, Esquire, Sports AField, Wooden Boat, Architectural Digest, Garden & Gun and the New York Times Magazine, , The Weekly Standard, as well as op-ed pieces in the New York Times and the Washington Post. He has made repeated appearances on all the television network morning talk shows as well as PBS’s Frontline and CBS’ Sunday Morning. In addition he has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, The History Channel, CBS Sports, ESPN’s Great Outdoors, and scores of radio broadcasts in the U.S. and abroad. He is also in demand on the lecture circuit, not only because of novels such as Forrest Gump, but also for his history books.

He has also appeared as a motion picture actor in the acclaimed Warner Brothers movie of Willie Morris’ novel, My Dog Skip.

For several years, Groom led a popular literary festival at the North Carolina mountain resort of High Hampton. Past guests have included: Pat Conroy, William Styron, George Plimpton, Dan Jenkins, Shana Alexander, Gay Talese, Peter Mathiessen, Kaye Gibbons, Peter Maas, Willie Morris and P. J. O’Rourke.

He lives with his wife, Anne-Clinton and their twelve-year-old daughter, Carolina Montgomery, in Point Clear, Alabama, where he enjoys the public’s continued warm response to his loveable, unlikely hero, Forrest Gump. He believes as Forrest says, “Always be able to look back and say, ‘At least, I didn’t lead no humdrum life.”

2011 Eugene Current-Garcia Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Literary Scholar Alabama The annual Eugene Current-Garcia Award for Alabama’s Writers Distinguished Literary Scholar recognizes and rewards Alabamians who have distinguished themselves as men or women of letters, specifically in scholarly reflection and Symposium writing on literary topics. Given each year at the Alabama Writers Symposium, hosted by Alabama Southern Community College in Monroeville, the award reflects the respect of the scholar’s peers in the academic community and signals to the citizenry at large the lasting importance of the pursuit of knowledge and of the contribution of literature to the culture. Annual selection of the recipient of the award is the task of the Association of College Literary Gumbo English Teachers of Alabama (ACETA), a diverse organization representing faculty at Songs, stories and all of Alabama’s two-year, four-year and doctoral institutions. characters that flavor Name of the Award: In a distinguished academic career spanning more than five decades, Dr. Eugene Current-Garcia published six books and dozens of articles Alabama literature and reviews on the short story genre and on American literature, particularly Old Southwest humor. His honors include serving as a Ford Foundation Fellow at Princeton in 1953-54, holding the Chair of American Literature as Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Thessaloniki, Greece, 1956-58, and being selected First American Scholar by Phi Kappa Phi in 1974. During a long teaching career May 5-7, 2011 at Auburn, he founded and co-edited the Southern Humanities Review, a major Monroeville, Alabama research publication. His high standards of scholarship and stellar achievements provide a model by which recipients of the annual award can be judged.

Criteria for Selection: Those eligible for consideration are native Alabamians whose careers in literary scholarship have developed in Alabama or elsewhere; or those not originally from Alabama whose scholarly careers have developed in Alabama; or those briefly resident in Alabama whose literary scholarship has focused primarily on Alabama writers and topics. Only living scholars are eligible.

Presentation of the Award: Presentation of the award will be made by the Executive Director of the Alabama Humanities Foundation or his/her designee. The Alabama Humanities Foundation presents the award as Alabama’s principal advocate of scholarship in the literary arts.

Corporate Benefactor: This annual award includes a $5,000 cash prize and The Clock Tower Bronze by Frank Fleming. This award is funded by George F. Landegger. David Sauer

Recipient of the Eugenue Current-Garcia Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Literary Scholar 2011

David Sauer is Professor Emeritus at the Jesuit College of Spring Hill where he directed and taught in the English Department. His Ph.D. is in English from Indiana University, with a minor in Theatre, and his B.A. is from the University of Notre Dame.

Taught at Indiana University by John Hafner, and convinced of the wonders of Mobile long before going on the job market he was offered a position by John at Spring Hill College which remarkably combined his interests in both English and Theatre, allowing him to pursue both simultaneously. The result was a magical twenty-year run directing plays, and learning by doing.

When a young Jesuit arrived wishing to take over the theatre, David switched his attention from stage to page, becoming a publishing scholar. A number of National Endowment for the Humanities summer grants enabled him to retool for a new perspective on teaching drama through performance, particularly with Shakespeare, and to work with the Alabama Shakespeare Theatre. The result was publication of articles in Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Yearbook, and the MLA volume on Teaching Shakespeare Through Performance.

In 1992 he pursued American Drama following John Hafner’s footsteps to Columbia to study American Drama with Howard Stein. As a result, he has published in American Drama, Modern Drama, and Shaw as well as a variety of other journals.

With his wife he has worked on all the issues of the David Mamet Review, doing an annual bibliography as well as writing David Mamet: A Resource and Production Sourcebook with her. In 2009 he published David Mamet’s Oleanna, a Continuum Modern Theatre Guide for Teachers and Students. In addition, he and Jan have published in the Cambridge Companions to David Mamet and August Wilson. He is President of the David Mamet Society.

In 2009 he was granted the honor of Professor Emeritus at Spring Hill College though he went on teaching beyond retirement. His most recent book, American Drama and the Postmodern: Fracturing the Realistic Stage is about to be published by Cambria Press.

He is currently working on a book on David Mamet as Chicago’s Playwright, and will present a paper and moderate a panel of actors and directors who worked with Mamet from the outset in Chicago May 15, 2011.