Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi (pub: May 15, 2018)

Hardback.

New in dust jacket.

A collection of essays for writers, readers, and lovers of all things southern.

Contributions by Julie Cantrell, Katherine Clark, Susan Cushman, Jim Dees, Clyde Edgerton, W. Ralph Eubanks, John M. Floyd, Joe Formichella, Patti Callahan Henry, Jennifer Horne, Ravi Howard, Suzanne Hudson, River Jordan, Harrison Scott Key, Cassandra King, Alan Lightman, Sonja Livingston, Corey Mesler, Niles Reddick, Wendy Reed, RP Saffire, Nicole Seitz, Lee Smith, Michael Farris Smith, Sally Palmer Thomason, Jacqueline Allen Trimble, M. O. Walsh, and Claude Wilkinson

"This is no stodgy how-to book. Southern Writers on Writing is over-flowing with good, strong voices - funny, caustic, compelling, and - yes - absurd. The writers Susan Cushman has assembled here understand this craft. They have endured the suffering that leads to great prose appearing so damn effortless. This collection is essential reading for emerging writers - as well as any fan of modern southern fiction." Neil White, author of In the Sanctuary of Outcasts

The South is often misunderstood on the national stage, characterized by its struggles with poverty, education, and racism, yet the region has yielded an abundance of undeniably great literature. In Southern Writers on Writing, Susan Cushman collects twenty-six writers from across the South whose work celebrates southern culture and shapes the landscape of contemporary southern literature. Contributors hail from Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida.

Contributors like Lee Smith, Michael Farris Smith, W. Ralph Eubanks, and Harrison Scott Key, among others, explore issues like race, politics, and family and the apex of those issues colliding. It discusses landscapes, voices in the South, and how writers write. The anthology is divided into six sections, including "Becoming a Writer"; "Becoming a Southern Writer"; "Place, Politics, People"; "Writing about Race"; "The Craft of Writing"; and "A Little Help from My Friends."

SUSAN CUSHMAN, Memphis, Tennessee, was codirector of the 2013 and 2010 Creative Nonfiction Conferences in Oxford, Mississippi, and director of the Memphis Creative Nonfiction Workshop in 2011. She is author of Tangles and Plaques: A Mother and Daughter Face Alzheimer's and Cherry Bomb and editor of A Second Blooming: Becoming the Women We Are Meant to Be. Her writing has appeared in many anthologies and journals.