NewSouth Books salutes distinguished civil rights attorney Fred Gray, author of Bus Ride to Justice: Changing the System by the System, the Life and Works of Fred Gray, who received a Phoenix Award presented by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation at a ceremony held in Washington, D.C. recently.

Mr. Gray received the Annual Legislative Conference Co-Chairs Award, given each year to an individual who has championed civil rights and social justice issues. In reviewing award candidates, the ALC award co-chairs also seek a person who has significantly impacted on the African-American community. This year’s award co-chairs were United States House Representatives Hakeem Jeffries and Terri Sewell.

Photographs courtesy Imagine Photography (top) and 609 Multi Media (bottom).

In 1955, at the age of 24, Fred Gray was the lawyer for Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, beginning the modern day civil rights movement and his own long and distinguished career as a civil rights attorney and activist. The ALC Co-Chair’s Phoenix Award is a fitting recognition of Mr. Gray’s groundbreaking work challenging racial discrimination.

Bus Ride to Justice is available from NewSouth Books or your favorite bookstore.

NewSouth Books is delighted to announce that Halley by Faye Gibbons has won the Silver Medal for Young Adult Fiction in the ninth Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards.

The awards are presented by Independent Publisher and the Jenkins Group. They feature gold, silver, and bronze award levels in 42 subject categories. The awards were created to celebrate children’s books and lifelong learning. Winners have included books from large publishers, university presses, and independents such as NewSouth Books. Judges for the award favor books of social relevance with strong content and original writing. Earlier this year, Halley was also named a Jefferson Cup Honor Book by the Virginia Library Association. Congratulations, Faye!

Halley is available from NewSouth Books or your favorite bookstore.

An essay by bestselling author Dorothy Allison, which serves as a foreword to Crooked Letter i, has won the attention of the Huffington Post. The essay frames a smart and moving anthology of LGBT stories about coming out in the South, edited by Connie Griffin and newly published by NewSouth Books. In recalling the days before “this new wondrous age with Supreme Court decisions affirming gay and lesbian marriage,” Allison reminds us of the courage it took to self-identify as LGBT.

“Confronting the enforced silence of manners and social expectations, we claimed our lives for ourselves. Was it heroic? Was it audacious, marvelous, scary and day by day painful? Of course. Did we change the world? Look around you and marvel.” Allison’s passionate and precisely observed essay serves as a resounding “amen” to the diverse contributions that shape Crooked Letter i, which has received early praise from Kevin Sessums, Bennett Singer, and others.

“In this remarkable collection of essays,” says Sessums, “these writers not only claim their rightful place in the landscape of letters but also the geography of juleps and cheese grits and our fundamentalist families.”

Crooked Letter i is available from NewSouth Books or your favorite bookstore.

As Confederate symbolism, hostility to immigration reform, voting rights, and Donald Trump mania roil the waters of Deep South politics in the run-up to the 2016 elections, Steve Suitts reveals the irony in a Southern Spaces blog post that white ex-Confederates were early beneficiaries of U.S. amnesty for illegal aliens.

via GIPHY

In his blog post, Suitts points out, “Many white southerners today are citizens, even though their ancestors took up arms against the United States and by their own reckoning gave up US citizenship to become part of a rebel nation. These same white southerners are US citizens today only because their ancestors benefited from a general, generous amnesty (far more than any group in this nation ever has) and from the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which Trump and his supporters, in effect, want to annul.”

Suitts, author of Hugo Black of Alabama: How His Roots and Early Career Shaped the Great Champion of the Constitution, is an adjunct lecturer at Emory University, senior fellow at the Southern Education Foundation, and the former director of the Southern Regional Council. He is a native of Winston County, Alabama.

Hugo Black of Alabama is available from NewSouth Books or your favorite bookstore.

Guest post by Gregg Swem, antiquarian book dealer and Wade Hall’s life partner

Kentucky poet Charles Semones died on September 13, 2015. He was 78. Although he lived in Harrodsburg in his latter years, he was originally from the Deep Creek community of Mercer County, Kentucky, west of Harrodsburg, a rural landscape of stark ridges and hollows which informed much of the writer’s work. He was the author of And All the Layered Light: Last Poems, published in NewSouth Books’s “The Conecuh Series” in 2007.

Wade Hall, who wrote the introduction to the collection, was a longtime friend and literary mentor of Semones. Hall edited Kentucky Poetry Review in Louisville for many years, and Semones was a frequent contrbutor to that publication. Semones’s poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, general magazines and religious publications. Hall, a native of Bullock County, Alabama, where he returned in 2006 after a long teaching career in Louisville, often referred to Semones as “Kentucky’s finest living poet.”

In 1973, Kentucky Poetry Review published Semones’ Witch Cry, his first collection of poetry. And in the spring of 1992, the last issue of Kentucky Poetry Review was dedicated to Semones, featuring 10 of his poems. The issue also included poems by such literary figures as Thomas Merton, the famous Trappist monk who had lived at the Abbey of Gethsemani near Bardstown, Kentucky; James Laughlin of New Directions, which published Merton’s works; Wendell Berry, James Baker Hall, Sarah Litsey, Jane Mayhall, James Still, Jim Wayne Miller and Jane Stuart.

Other volumes of poetry by Charles Semones are Homeplace (1993), Hard Love (1994), and Afternoon in the Country of Summer: New and Selected Poems (2003). He is also the author of a book of essays, A Storm of Honey: Notes from the Sabbath Country (2004). In 2003, he was given the inaugural Kentucky Literary Award for Excellence in Poetry.

Harking back to the earliest days of his association with Charles Semones in Kentucky, editor Hall points out in And All the Layered Light that he soon discovered he was “a talented, driven poet” unlike others he knew. “He seemed to inhabit another land, another country. Most of his poems were grounded in a place in Central Kentucky he called The Sabbath Country, which I discovered was based on his native Mercer County, and in particular, the rural inhabitants. . . .” In what was to be Semones’s last collection of poems, Hall found “a world of longing and desire, of passion and pursuit, of rapture and depression.” Furthermore, he states, “In his reclusive, gospel-drenched, haunted world of draped mirrors and desperate dog days of summer, the poet-lover moves along his lonely route seeking and hoping for at least a brief respite from the Gothic horrors, internal and external, that curse his journey. Semones’s own autobiographical travels and travails, which he has translated into a universal poetry of the soul, will resonate deeply with anyone who thinks deeply about the human condition.”

And All the Layered Light is available from NewSouth Books or your favorite bookstore.

NewSouth Books co-founder and editor in chief Randall Williams eulogized his friend author Wade Hall, who passed away on September 26, in an article for the Montgomery Advertiser. NewSouth Books published five titles by Hall: Conecuh People: Words of Life from the Alabama Black Belt, An Interview with Abraham Lincoln, Waters of Life from the Conecuh Ridge: The Clyde May Story, Reflections of the Civil War in Southern Humor, and The Outrageous Times of Larry Bruce Mitchell. Due out in spring 2016: Greetings from Alabama: A Pictorial History in Vintage Postcards, which showcases 400 plus postcards from a large bequest Hall made to the University of Alabama Libraries. Hall’s many gifts as scholar, writer, educator, and philanthropist are warmly recounted in Williams’s piece.

Louisville NPR station WFPL also noted Hall’s passing and praised him as a teacher and scholar. Charles Whaley, former Courier-Journal education editor, told the paper, “Through his work with and advocacy of Kentucky poets and writers Wade Hall established himself as a centrifugal force for literature in Kentucky and the South.”

Conecuh People: Words of Life from the Alabama Black Belt. An Interview with Abraham Lincoln, Waters of Life from the Conecuh Ridge: The Clyde May Story, Reflections of the Civil War in Southern Humor, and The Outrageous Times of Larry Bruce Mitchell are all available from NewSouth Books or your favorite bookstore.