Georgia Writers Hall of Fame 2009

The University of Georgia Library has announced the 2009 inductees for the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. Coleman Barks, who taught poetry and creative writing at UGA for more than 30 years, and Georgia poet laureate David Bottoms, whose honors include the Walt Whitman Award, will be inducted at the ceremony in March, along with two posthumous honorees: Raymond Andrews and Robert Burch.

Barks received worldwide acclaim for his translations of the work of the Sufi mystic Jelaluddin Rumi. He has also published six collections of his own poetry.

Bottoms first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, was chosen by Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and poet Robert Penn Warren from more than 1,300 submissions as winner of the 1979 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. He teaches at Georgia State University where he co-founded the literary journal Five Points.

Raymond Andrews was born into a sharecropping family in rural Georgia in 1934. He won the James Baldwin prize for his first novel, Appalachee Red, and went on to publish two more novels in what would become known as his Muskhogean Trilogy. Walter Cronkite called Andrews’ first memoir, The Last Radio Baby, “One of the truest and best pieces of writing I have ever come across.” Andrews died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Athens, GA, in 1991.

Robert Burch is the author of 19 books and is best known for his children’s stories, including Queenie Peavy and Ida Early Comes Over the Mountain. Burch’s stories frequently focus on rural life during the Great Depression. Burch died Christmas Day, 2007.

The ceremony takes place at 10:30 AM March 24 in the Frank Daniel Foley, Jr. Rotunda of the Miller Learning Center. There will also be an Author’s Discussion on March 23 at 4 PM at the Reading Room of the Miller Center. Both events are free and open to the public. Join in, and be a part of Georgia literary history.

John Dufresne's Requiem Mass

GPB's Jesse Freeman interviews John Dufresne, author of Requiem, Mass on Cover to Cover this week:

Requiem, Mass. is the tale of 8^th grade boy struggling to keep his family together despite the lies of his absent father and the delusions of his pathological mother. It’s also the tale of that same boy, grown to be a writer and teacher, struggling to save his adult sister from the residuals of the tumultuous childhood they shared. It is on these two planes that our narrator, John, entertains and edifies with rip-roaring humor and breathtaking pathos.

It is also on these two planes that fiction and memoir converge. See, John Dufresne is that writer/professor with the mixed up family, and his writing is perhaps so poignant and powerful because it inspired by the real-life obstacles he’s been confronted with throughout his life.

In our interview, Dufresne is surprisingly forthcoming about the aspects of memoir that permeate this novel. He talks about what is real and what isn’t, and about the precarious gray area that he has created by couching this work as a novel. Truth, it seems, is indeed stranger than fiction. Airing this Sunday at 8:00PM, its GPB's Cover to Cover. Tune in!

Gay And Lesbian History of Atlanta, Sunday at 8pm on Cover To Cover

Join us as GPB Southern Lit Cadre member Jeff Calder interviews Wesley Chenault and Stacy Braukman, who have written Gay and Lesbian Atlanta. The book grew out of a 2005 Atlanta History Center exhibit called "The Unspoken Past-Atlanta Lesbian and Gay History," which explored an alternative history of Atlanta that runs parallel to the city's rise as a regional center of industry, arts, and culture.

Calder's rollicking chat with Chenault and Braukman touches on things humorous and poignant, and a time when Atlanta then, as now, was a magnet for people from across the South who came to the city to live lives they couldn't often openly live in surrounding smaller communities. If you are a student of Southern and Atlanta history, this interview will give you a new perspective.

Poet Ralph Tejeda Wilson talks about The Black Bridge, and the Georgia Writer Of The Year Competition Sunday at 8pm On Cover To Cover

Join Southern Lit Cadre member Melissa Stiers for a conversation with Ralph Tejeda Wilson about poetry and the Georgia Writer of The Year competition. Tejeda will also talk about his 2002 poetry collection, A Black Bridge. Sunday at 8pm right after This American Life on your local GPB radio station.

Happy Holidays!

This week, we take a break from Cover to Cover this week to bring you some holiday cheer:

Hanukkah Lights 2008 – Sunday, 12/21, 6 to 7pm
A perennial NPR favorite, now well into its second decade. Acclaimed authors explore Hanukkah traditions in original stories written expressly for “Hanukkah Lights.” Hosted by Murray Horwitz and Susan Stamberg. (pre-empts “Big Band Jump”)

Happy Joyous Hannukah – Sunday, 12/21, 7 to 8pm
Features a concert from New York City-based Grammy-award-winning band, the Klezmatics. Hosted by Murray Horwitz. (pre-empts “This American Life”)

Paul Winter’s Winter Solstice Concert– Sunday, 12/21, 8 to 10pm
The holiday tradition continues with Paul Winter’s Winter Solstice Celebration. The extraordinary acoustics of New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine highlight the music of the Winter Consort with Eugene Friesen, Paul Sullivan and Brazlian percussionist Café leading us through the longest night of the year, with singer/guitarist Renato Braz and “Icarus” double-reed man Paul McCandless. This year’s celebration debuts Apache singer John-Carolos Perea and musical performances from the 2008 Grammy winning CD Crestone. John Schaefer hosts.

Tune in to GPB throughout the month of December for our special holiday programming. Click here for the full holiday programming lineup.

Lincoln: President Elect

This week on Cover to Cover, Dr. Stan Deaton sits down with Harold Holzer, author of Lincoln: President Elect. Holzer, one of the most eminent Lincoln scholars, winner of a Lincoln Prize for his Lincoln at Cooper Union, examines the four months between Lincoln’s election and Inauguration when the president-elect made the most important decision of his coming presidency—there would be no compromise on slavery or secession of the slaveholding states even at the cost of an inevitable Civil War.

Stan & Harold discuss the book and connections to our current president elect. All this on Cover to Cover; broadcasting on your favorite GPB station.

Sarah Vowell's Wordy Shipmates On Cover To Cover Thanksgiving Weekend

Frank Reiss interviews Sarah Vowell about her new book about the Puritans, The Wordy Shipmates. Here are Franks thoughts about Sarah and the interview. The show airs Sunday night at 8pm, the following Thursday night at 11:30pm and is available online for on demand listening at gpb.org/covertocover.
While the so-called “Republican base” gets a charge out of the feisty Sarah Palin, for the public radio crowd, there’s an equal and opposite excitement generated by another sassy Sarah, “This American Life” contributor Sarah Vowell. Vowell is a public radio star in part because of the incongruity of her little girl voice talking about very serious subjects with a striking intelligence and obvious depth of knowledge. What can go unnoticed in her most famous role is what a uniquely gifted writer she is. Reading her books leaves no doubt about these gifts. They combine an enthusiasm more often associated with the young rock critic she once was with a profundity that can only come from the kind of focused study that usually results in deadening history books people read only when forced to. And there’s also her post-modern wit that makes her a favorite guest of David Letterman and Jon Stewart. All of which add up to some of the most enjoyable books being written by the distinctive generation of writers that include Dave Eggers, Nick Hornby and the rest of the McSweeney’s/Believer set. Vowell’s latest book, The Wordy Shipmates, is also her most ambitious. Its subject is the Puritans who settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 under the leadership of John Winthrop. Winthrop’s most famous sermon included the image of “The City on the Hill” which was so effectively used by President Ronald Reagan. It is this connection that fuels Vowell’s research, examining this image as the origin of American exceptionalism, and the irony of how this sermon on “Christian Charity” came to inspire quite uncharitable political policies. In conversation, Vowell is just as one would hope: funny, self-deprecating, and tending to let conversation go off into unpredictable, though always entertaining, directions.-Frank Reiss