The Alabama Book Festival

The fifth annual Alabama Book Festival was held in Montgomery on April 17. As usual the weather held up, quite warm but not hot, and the plethora of usual suspects were all attendance. Pulitzer Prize-winner Rick Bragg was wandering around, and Daniel Wallace, the author of the immensely popular novel-turned-film Big Fish spoke later in the day. Lots more local favorites were on the bill, too: fiction writers Kirk Curnutt and Julia Oliver, journalist Frye Galliard, and historian Mary Ann Neely. I ran into my friend Irene Latham who was speaking about her new book, Leaving Gee's Bend. While talking to David Braly I found out that my friend Joel Brouwer, a poet who teaches at the MFA program at the University of Alabama, was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Amos Kennedy was there too, churning out prints and taunting the crowd.

This event is a lot like Alabama, a pleasant mix of old and new, of stereotype and originality. Where the Southern storytellers are counterbalanced by Jeanie Thompson's impeccable taste in poets for the Poetry Tent, the traditional and the modern commingle really nicely.

I always bring my students out to the festival, mainly under the guise of manning a display table of our works, but moreover to have them out and about in the festival, meeting people and hearing readings. One of my students, whose poetry placed in the High School Literary Arts Awards, got to read some of her poetry during the noon hour slot, a coveted time to read. But really what I want them to see is that "Southern literature" is alive and well, evolving into what the South is now.

On the friday before the festival, we had poets Sean Hill and DéLana Dameron come to class for part of the afternoon. Really cool people. DéLana did a pantoum exercise with the students, then Sean did a dice-rolling poetry game where chance decides the fate of the poem.

I spoke for about fifteen or twenty minutes about my book, The Life and Poetry of John Beecher, during the 10:00-10:30 time slot. Unfortunately the talk wasn't very well attended, but I'm trying to look on the bright side: making onto the schedule is a triumph in itself. Lots of writers around the state would kill to be on the schedule.

If you're interested in the Alabama Book Festival, check out the website, or become a fan of Facebook . . . pick your preferred digital media. Even in Alabama, we do have the internet.