Bookmark with Don Noble: Kathryn Magendie (2011)
Bookmark with Don Noble
Kathryn Magendie’s fiction is known for its lyrical, intimate voice and its deep attention to family, memory, place, and the difficult work of finding one’s way home. In Tender Graces, the first novel in her Graces series, Magendie follows Virginia Kate Carey as she returns to her Appalachian roots and confronts the painful history of a fractured family. In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble, Don Noble speaks with Kathryn Magendie at the annual literary conference On the Brink, held at Jacksonville State University. Their conversation explores Magendie’s distinctive personal style,...
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Bookmark with Don Noble: John Sledge (2011)
Bookmark with Don Noble
John S. Sledge has spent much of his career studying, preserving, and interpreting the history of Mobile, Alabama. As book review editor for the Mobile Press-Register and architectural historian for the Mobile Historic Development Commission, Sledge has brought together a critic’s eye, a historian’s discipline, and a deep affection for the Gulf Coast. In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble, Don Noble speaks with John Sledge in Reese Phifer Hall on the campus of The University of Alabama. Their conversation explores Sledge’s work on Mobile’s built environment, its literary and...
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Bookmark with Don Noble: Jennifer Paddock (2009)
Bookmark with Don Noble
In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble, Don Noble speaks with Jennifer Paddock at the Friends Bookstore in the Fairhope Public Library during the annual gathering Southern Writers Reading. Their conversation explores Paddock’s early novels, her interest in women at turning points in their lives, and the pull of places such as Point Clear, Fairhope, Destin, and the Gulf Coast. Paddock is the author of A Secret Word, Point Clear, and The Weight of Memory. She earned a master’s degree in creative writing from New York University, and her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in...
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Bookmark with Don Noble: Jeffery Stepakoff (2011)
Bookmark with Don Noble
Jeffrey Stepakoff spent more than a decade in Hollywood as a television writer, working on series including Dawson’s Creek, The Wonder Years, and Sisters. Those years in writers’ rooms, pitch meetings, and network television helped shape his memoir Billion-Dollar Kiss: The Kiss That Saved Dawson’s Creek and Other Adventures in TV Writing, a behind-the-scenes look at life as a screenwriter during a booming era for scripted television. In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble, Don Noble speaks with Jeffrey Stepakoff at the annual literary conference On the Brink at Jacksonville State...
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Bookmark with Don Noble: Janisse Ray (2009)
Bookmark with Don Noble
In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble, Don Noble speaks with Janisse Ray in Carmichael Library on the campus of the University of Montevallo. Their conversation explores Ray’s life and work, her deep connection to the rural South, and the ways personal history, ecology, and activism come together in her writing. Ray’s acclaimed memoir Ecology of a Cracker Childhood helped establish her as a major voice in environmental literature, weaving her childhood in rural Georgia with a call to preserve the endangered longleaf pine ecosystem. Her work has been widely taught and anthologized and...
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Bookmark with Don Noble: Inman Majors (2009)
Bookmark with Don Noble
In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble, author Inman Majors discusses his third novel, The Millionaires, a fictionalized account of the brothers who helped bring the World’s Fair to Knoxville, Tennessee. Blending history, humor, and sharp social observation, Majors explores ambition, family, money, and the subtle distinctions of class in the New South. The novel offers a smart and serious look at how personal dreams and civic pride can collide in a changing Southern landscape. Don Noble spoke with Inman Majors on the campus of The University of Alabama.
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Bookmark with Don Noble: Gin Phillips (2012)
Bookmark with Don Noble
In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble, Alabama author Gin Phillips joins Don Noble in the studio at Reese Phifer Hall on the campus of the University of Alabama to discuss her novel Come In and Cover Me. Phillips first gained national attention with her debut novel, The Well and the Mine, set in Carbon Hill, Alabama in 1931, which won the 2009 Barnes & Noble Discover Award. Rather than returning to an Alabama mining town for her second novel, Phillips shifted her attention to New Mexico, telling the story of an archaeologist working among ancient Native American ruins in the 21st...
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Bookmark with Don Noble: Galway Kinnell (2001)
Bookmark with Don Noble
In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble, Don Noble talks with distinguished American poet Galway Kinnell, whose long career made him one of the most admired poetic voices of his generation. Kinnell, whose Selected Poems won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, was also a MacArthur Fellow, a former Vermont State Poet, and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Known for poems that explore marriage, children, the body, mortality, animals, the natural world—and, memorably, oatmeal—Kinnell brings warmth, humor, and moral seriousness to this conversation about poetry...
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Bookmark with Don Noble: David Guterson (2004)
Bookmark with Don Noble
In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble, novelist David Guterson joins Don Noble at Writing Today, Birmingham-Southern College’s annual conference for readers and writers, for a conversation about fiction, place, and the Pacific Northwest landscapes that shape his work. Best known for his bestselling novel Snow Falling on Cedars, winner of the 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Guterson has built a literary career rooted in Washington state, with novels including East of the Mountains and Our Lady of the Forest.
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Bookmark with Don Noble: Beth Ann Fennelly (2008)
Bookmark with Don Noble
In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble, poet and writer Beth Ann Fennelly talks with Don Noble at the J.D. Williams Library at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. A native of the Chicago suburbs who has become as rooted as kudzu in the American South, Fennelly brings humor, insight, and lyric intelligence to a conversation about poetry, place, family, and the writer’s life. Fennelly, who served as Mississippi Poet Laureate from 2016 to 2021, teaches in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi and is the author of poetry, nonfiction, and micro-memoir, including Open House,...
info_outlineRick Bragg won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1996 for his work at The New York Times. Born in Piedmont, Alabama, in 1959, Mr. Bragg is the author of two best-selling memoirs, All Over But the Shoutin’ and Ava’s Man, as well as his newly released The Prince of Frogtown. He credits his writing ability to the oral storytelling of family and friends in his childhood in the Appalachian foothills of Alabama, saying: “My grandfather on my daddy’s side and my grandma on my momma’s side used to try and cuss their miseries away. They could out-cuss any damn body I have ever seen. I am only an amateur cusser at best, but I inherited other things from these people who grew up on the ridges and deep in the hollows of northeastern Alabama, the foothills of the Appalachians. They taught me, on a thousand front porch nights, as a million jugs passed from hand to hand, how to tell a story.” Bragg has told stories and taught writing at Harvard University, the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, Boston University, the University of South Florida, and other colleges. Bragg became a domestic correspondent in The New York Times’ Atlanta office in October 1994. Before joining The New York Times he worked at several newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times and the St. Petersburg Times, covering murders and unrest in Haiti as a metro reporter, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Jonesboro killings, the Susan Smith trial, and more as a national correspondent based in Atlanta. He later became the paper’s Miami bureau chief just in time for Elian Gonzalez’s arrival and the international controversy surrounding the Cuban boy. Bragg attended Harvard University as a Nieman Fellow from 1992 to 1993 (“the only real college I ever had”) and beside his Pulitzer Prize, he is the recipient of the American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award and 31 other national, regional and state writing awards. He has had stories included in Best Newspaper Writing 1991, Best of the Press 1988, and two journalism textbooks on good writing and foreign reporting. He now works as a writing professor at the University of Alabama’s journalism program in its College of Communications and Information Sciences.