Description
Alabama has a storied history: Fewer than ten generations ago, Alabama was owned by the Spanish (who claimed Mobile until 1813), then the British, and then the United States, after failing to secede into a Confederacy. Following the Civil War, Alabama suffered economic collapse and depended on the few crops it could sell or export to exist as a unified state. Today, the state thrives, but its troubled history has left a mark that, with hope, fades with time, compassion, and understanding.
Alabama is among the most naturally dynamic states in the nation, its ecosystems ranging from Appalachian mountains, through rolling Piedmont, to the vast Gulf Shore.
In this tenth volume of The Southern Poetry Anthology, the editors have achieved a remarkable task; they have revealed another wide variegation that makes Alabama so dynamic: poets in the Yellowhammer State with both established and new voices. They have elucidated the impressive and exciting diversity of poets who consider or have considered Alabama home.
About the Author
WILLIAM WRIGHT is author or editor of over twenty nationally published books, with several forthcoming. Most recently, Wright published Grass Chapels: New & Selected Poems with Mercer University Press in 2021. Wright has been named the Georgia Author of the Year, the Georgia Editor of the Year, and won the Terrain.org Grand Prize. Wright was named Writer-in-Residence at the University of Tennessee in 2016 and Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University and Oxford College of Emory from 2017-2020. Currently, he’s working on a novel, a collection of essays, and a volume of poetry.
TAYLOR BYAS (she/her) is a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she is an Associate Editor for Cincinnati Review and an Assistant Features Editor for The Rumpus. She is the 1st place winner of the 2020 Poetry Super Highway, the 2020 Frontier Poetry Award for New Poets Contests, and the 2021 Adrienne Rich Poetry Prize. She is the author of the chapbooks Bloodwarm and Shutter, and her debut full-length I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times will be out with Soft Skull Press in August 2023. She is represented by Rena Rossner of the Deborah Harris Agency.
J. BRUCE FULLER is the author of How to Drown a Boy (LSU Press, 2024). His chapbooks include The Dissenter’s Ground, Lancelot, and Flood, and his poems have appeared at The Southern Review, McNeese Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Best New Poets 2022, among others. He has received scholarships from Bread Loaf, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He teaches at Sam Houston State University where he is Director of TRP: The University Press of SHSU.
ADAM VINES is a professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he edits Birmingham Poetry Review. He is the author of five collections of poetry, the latest, Lures (LSU Press, 2022) He has published poems in The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, and Poetry, among other journals.
Praise for
The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume X: Alabama
“As one might expect from an assemblage of poets with Alabama roots or connections, pastoral or small-town settings play a prominent role in much of their work. Rivers, snakes, moonshine, logging trucks, kudzu, cicadas, and other rural emblems appear often. If there’s a soundtrack throughout, it consists of hymns and country music, even if specific musicians or songs are seldom mentioned. . . . Given Alabama’s doom-laden past, mentioned by Adam Vines in his introduction, it comes as no surprise that a number of poems collected here evoke the state’s fractious history, sometimes from an achingly personal perspective.“
—Ken Autrey, in Alabama Writers' Forum
— Ken Autrey
