Nine Southern authors have been elected to the first board of directors of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and an executive director chosen to supervise its activities.
The newly-elected directors include University of Tennessee at Knoxville English professor Allen Wier and University of Memphis English professor Richard Bausch - both novelists. Mr. Bausch serves as chancellor of the Fellowship. Other board members are essayist John Shelton Reed, vice-chancellor of the Fellowship; novelist Doris Betts, ex-chancellor; novelists Dorothy Allison, Josephine Humphreys, Bobbie Ann Mason and Louis D. Rubin, Jr.; and poet Ellen Bryant Voigt.
The Fellowship's action will accelerate plans to expand writers-in-the-schools and to begin a program of readings/conferences around the country over the next 10 years, according to Mr. Bausch.
"The Fellowship is first of all involved in the work of honoring good writing and helping young southern writers along," said Mr. Bausch, who holds a chair of excellence in English at the University of Memphis. "We also want to raise the visibility of the awards and widen the net of recognition for good writing."
Susan Robinson, executive director of the Chattanooga Arts & Education Council, will serve as the Fellowship's executive director. Carolyn Mitchell, publications editor for the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce, will serve as part-time publicist for the Fellowship.
The Fellowship of Southern Writers was founded in 1987 by 26 distinguished Southern writers, including novelists, poets, historians, playwrights, critics and editors. Founders included Cleanth Brooks, Walker Percy, Robert Penn Warren and Eudora Welty.
"The Fellowship exists to nurture literature in the American South through recognizing distinguished achievement," said Mr. Rubin, who was among the founding members of the Fellowship. "The Fellowship awards prizes and fellowships for significant work by Southern authors and pursues other activities that stimulate Southern literary endeavor of a significant order."
The Fellowship located in Chattanooga after several of the founders participated in the Chattanooga Arts & Education Council's Conference on Southern Literature. The Fellowship chose to locate its headquarters in Chattanooga, to house its archives at UTC and to hold its biennial meetings in conjunction with the AEC conferences.
"From the beginning, we could see that the Conference, which was drawing people from all over the U.S., would become the leading literary event in the South," Mr. Rubin said. "We were impressed with the quality of the program, the way the event was organized and the spirit of the occasion that brought writers and their admirers together during lectures, panel discussions and book-signings. It was altogether remarkably pleasant and uplifting -- just the kind of event we wanted to be associated with."
The Fellowship seeks to recognize and encourage literature in the South by commemorating outstanding literary achievement with awards and prizes, by encouraging young writers and by recognizing distinction in writing by election to membership in the Fellowship of Southern Writers. The Fellowship has a maximum membership of 50.
Richard Bausch has received the O. Henry Prize, the Best American Short Story Prize, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He is the author of Hello to the Cannibals; Real Presence; Good Evening Mr. & Mrs. America, and All the Ships at Sea; Violence; and Take Me Back. Bausch's short stories have appeared in Esquire and The New Yorker. His latest work is Thanksgiving Night.
John Shelton Reed was founding co-editor of the quarterly Southern Cultures. His books include The Enduring South, Southern Folk Plain and Fancy, Whistling Dixie, Kicking Back, 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About the South, and Minding the South. Holy Smoke, a book about North Carolina barbecue, will be published in 2008.
Dorothy Allison's first novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her second novel, Cavedweller, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, won the 1998 Lambda Literary Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the Lillian Smith Prize. Trash, published by Penguin Plume in 2002, included "Compassion" which appeared in The Best American Short Stories: 2003 and The Best of the South: 2003. She is currently working on another novel, She Who.
Doris Betts, former chancellor of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, is the author of nine novels and short story collections, including The Gentle Insurrection, The Sharp Teeth of Love, Souls Raised from the Dead, which won the Southern Book Award, and Beasts of the Southern Wild, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Betts taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for 35 years. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and received a medal from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Josephine Humphreys is the author of four novels: Dreams of Sleep (winner of the 1985 PEN/Hemingway Award), Rich in Love, The Fireman's Fair, and Nowhere Else on Earth, an historical novel based on the true story of the Lumbee Indian outlaw Henry Lowrie. A former Guggenheim Fellow and winner of the Lyndhurst Prize, she lives in Charleston, South Carolina, where she was born.
Bobbie Ann Mason's first book of fiction, Shiloh and Other Stories, received the Ernest Hemingway Award. Other works include In Country, Spence + Lila, Feather Crowns, Clear Springs, Elvis Presley, and Zigzagging Down A Wild Trail. Mason has received National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim Fellowships. She is Writer- in-Residence at the University of Kentucky, and her most recent novels are An Atomic Romance and Nancy Culpepper.
Louis D. Rubin, Jr., past chancellor of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, is a literary critic and historian, editor, and novelist. Works include Thomas Wolfe: A Collection of Critical Essays, The Faraway Country, The Curious Death of the Novel, The Wary Fugitives, Small Craft Advisory, Seaports of the South: A Journey, and A Memory of Trains. His novels are The Golden Weather, Surfaces of a Diamond, and The Heat of the Sun. His most recent book is Where the Southern Cross the Yellow Dog.
Ellen Bryant Voigt's books of poetry include Claiming Kin, The Forces of Plenty, The Lotus Flowers, Two Trees, and Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006. Kyrie was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and Shadow of Heaven for the National Book Award. A Guggenheim, Lila Wallace and National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, she was awarded the O.B. Hardison Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the 2002 Merrill Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, where she was subsequently named a chancellor. She is a former Poet Laureate of Vermont and has also published The Flexible Lyric, a collection of craft essays.
Allen Wier is the author of Blanco, Things About to Disappear, Departing as Air, A Place for Outlaws, and Tehano. He has edited Voicelust: Eight Contemporary Writers on Style and Walking on Water and Other Stories. His fiction and essays have appeared in numerous periodicals including The Southern Review, Five Points and The Georgia Review. He has received Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. He holds the Hodges Chair for Distinguished Teaching, and in 2005 the graduate students in UT's Department of English voted Wier the department's "most outstanding professor in the classroom."