Featured Authors, 1998

Rick Bragg

Air Date: 06/04/98

Pulitzer prize winning journalist Rick Bragg talks about "All Over but the Shouting," the moving and evocative memoir about his hardscrabble childhood in North Alabama with a troubled, alcoholic father and a loving but struggling mother. Univ. of AL English professor Don Noble hosts this series.

Margaret Walker Alexander

Acclaimed poet and fiction writer Margaret Walker Alexander grew up in Birmingham, and her novel Jubilee has been called a black Gone With the Wind. She talks with host Don Noble about her long career and her association with the writer Richard Wright.

Winston Groom

Since creating Forrest Gump, the world’s most famous idiot savant, Winston Groom has been busy writing a sequel to that novel, "Gump & Co.," and "Shrouds of Glory," a Civil War history. Groom also talks to host Don Noble about his earlier novels that are set in Mobile.

Nanci Kincaid

Nanci Kincaid lives in Arizona now, but the South has been the setting of her much of her fiction including her new collection of short stories, Pretending the Bed is a Raft. Kincaid talks with host Don Noble about her work in progress, a novel about the wife of a college football coach.

Robert Branham

Air Date: 07/02/98

Martin Luther King, Jr., and Jesse Jackson are praised as gifted speakers, but they are only two of many fascinating African American orators. Host Don Noble talks with Robert Branham about his new book Lift "Every Voice: African American Oratory, 1787-1900."

A. Manette Ansay

Novelist A. Manette Ansay talks with host Don Noble about the importance of the physical landscape in her novels, the latest of which is "River Angel," where an angel may—or may not have—appeared to a struggling community.

John Barth

Air Date: 07/16/98

Host Don Noble speaks with John Barth, one of the nation’s most distinguished men of letters, about his preoccupation in his fiction with twins and Shahrazad, the enchanting storyteller from A Thousand and One Arabian Nights.

Lee May

Lee May, a journalist born in Mississippi, was at ground zero covering many of the major news events of the last 20 years. May talks with host Don Noble about his memoir of reconciliation with his father and his decision to quit writing front page news. May also talks about the gardening columns he writes for the Atlanta Constitution and Southern Accents.

Dale Short

Dale Short claims Shanghai, Ala., as his home, but his rollicking novel "The Shining, Shining Path" takes readers across the South following a group of musical Tibetan monks as they play concerts and fight Evil to avert a cataclysmic end to the planet.

Connie May Fowler

Air Date: 08/06/98

Don Noble speaks with Connie May Fowler of Florida about her newest novel, "Before Women Had Wings," which was made into a TV movie by Oprah Winfrey.

Horton Foote

Air Date: 08/27/98

Horton Foote has two Oscars, a Pulitzer, and an Emmy. Born and raised in Texas, his home state is often the setting for his plays and screenplays. Host Don Noble talks with Foote about his many plays and about his beautiful screen adaptation of Harper Lee’s "To Kill a Mockingbird."

Andrew Glaze; Deborah McDowell

Air Date: 09/03/98

Don Noble talks with Andrew Glaze about growing up in Birmingham and his new collection of poetry, "Someone Will Go On Owing." Deborah McDowell, raised in Bessemer, talks about "Leaving Pipeshop," which is about her family and the other African-Americans who worked in industrial Birmingham.

Tom Rabbitt

Tom Rabitt, recently retired founder and director of the creative writing program at the Univ. of AL, speaks with host Don Noble about his poetry, much of it set in his adopted state of Alabama.

John Shelton Reed, Dale Reed

Air Date: 09/17/98

John Shelton Reed and his wife, Dale, talk about "One Thousand and One Things Everyone Should Know about the South," their entertaining compendium of facts about the region. A professor of sociology at Chapel Hill, Reed has spoken with authority on this complicated subject of the South in several books. Host: Don Noble.

Elizabeth Cox, Janet Burroway

Elizabeth Cox and Janet Burroway both teach and write. In their books they’ve dealt with subjects including race, feminism, and family relations. Don Noble talks with them at the Birmingham-Southern Writer’s Conference in 1998.

Lewis Nordan

Air Date: 10/01/98

Don Noble speaks with Lewis Nordan, who sets much of his darkly humorous fiction in the Mississippi he knew as a child. Now living in Pittsburgh, Nordan’s novels include "Wolf Whistle," "Sharpshooter Blues," and "Music of the Swamp."

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