Dori Sanders

For years the legendary John Seigenthaler hosted A Word on Words on Nashville's public television station, WNPT. During the show’s four-decade run (1972 to 2013), he interviewed some of the most interesting and most impor­tant writers of our time. These in-depth exchanges revealed much about the writers who appeared on his show and gave a glimpse into their creative pro­cesses. Seigenthaler was a deeply engaged reader and a generous interviewer, a true craftsman. Frye Gaillard and Pat Toomay have collected and transcribed some of the iconic interactions from the show. Featuring interviews with: Arna Bontemps • Marshall Chapman • Pat Conroy • Rodney Crowell • John Egerton • Jesse Hill Ford • Charles Fountain • William Price Fox • Kinky Friedman • Frye Gaillard • Nikki Giovanni • Doris Kearns Goodwin • David Halberstam • Waylon Jennings • John Lewis • David Maraniss • William Marshall • Jon Meacham • Ann Patchett • Alice Randall • Dori Sanders • John Seigenthaler Sr. • Marty Stuart • Pat Toomay

Clover Hill is ten years old when her father, the principal of the local elementary school, marries a white woman, Sara Kate. Just hours later, an automobile accident compels Clover to forge a relationship with the new stepmother she hardly knows in this beautiful, enduring novel about a family lost and found. First published by Algonquin in 1990 and winner of the Lillian Smith Award for Southern literature that enhances racial awareness, Clover is a national bestseller and has been recommended reading for classrooms across the country. Now on our thirtieth anniversary we have the pleasure of republishing this Algonquin classic in trade paperback, with an original essay by the author. In the spirit of Cold Sassy Tree and The Secret Life of Bees, Clover is a witty, insightful classic for readers of all ages.

Her Own Place traces the life and times of Mae Lee Barnes, an African American woman from rural South Carolina. The novel begins with Mae Lee's life as a teenager in the 1940s and follows her eventual marriage to her boyfriend, Jeff Barnes, who proposes before going off to fight in World War II. While Jeff is in the army, Mae Lee works rotating shifts at a local munitions plant and saves every penny she can to purchase a small farm. When Jeff returns from the war, he alternates between spending time on the farm and going to find work in the city, and eventually they decide to start a new life in the city together. The day their new life is to begin, Jeff abandons Mae Lee and their five children, and the story traces Mae Lee's struggles and triumphs after Jeff leaves, including her challenges as a single parent on a working farm, her life after her children are grown, the realities of racial integration in the South, and the realisation that her memory is slipping away.This Southern Revivals edition includes a new introduction from the author.

A poignant collection of 150 photographs, Camera Man's Journey takes us to a place at once familiar and foreign. Set in the South early in the twentieth century, these photographs bridge a distance not only of time but also of contrasting attitudes and customs.The images show African Americans in or around Columbia, Beaufort, and Hilton Head, South Carolina. Some photographs were taken in surroundings where blacks might associate with whites—out of necessity and according to strict custom. Most of the images, however, are set in "colored sections" or other remote areas of town and country where blacks were obliged to fashion lives apart. Under segregation and disenfranchisement, men, women, and children are portrayed in ordinary occupations and pursuits: a peddler selling his wares, a woman tying a toddler's shoes, a barber and his young apprentice taking a break outside their shop.Julian Dimock, whose works appeared often in major travel and nature magazines, took the photographs in 1904-5. So many photographers of the era tended to romanticize or politicize their African American subjects; Dimock was different. Signs of want and inequity are plain to see in these images, but Dimock portrays his subjects as they really were in all of their dignity, strength, and beauty.