A scholar of southern culture, two poets, and an historical novelist will be inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame at its 2017 ceremony in November.
Established by the University of Georgia Libraries in 2000, the hall seeks to honor Georgia writers past and present.
“It is always exciting to share the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame judges’ selections each year,” said P. Toby Graham, university librarian and associate provost. “And each year it is our privilege to remind Georgia readers of the wealth our state’s literary heritage.”
James C. Cobb is the B. Phinizy Spalding Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Georgia, where he has taught since 1997. A former president of the Southern Historical Association, Cobb has written widely on the interaction among economy, society and culture in the American South. His books include The Selling of The South: The Southern Crusade for Industrial Development, 1936-1990, The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity and Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity. His most recent book is The South and America Since World War II. Cobb is a frequent contributor to op-ed pages and also a prodigious blogger at http://cobbloviate.com.
Cobb has earned numerous accolades for writing, research and teaching, including an honorary doctorate in humane letters, Washington and Lee University; the Woodward-Franklin Award for Excellence in Historical Writing, Fellowship of Southern Writers; and the Albert Christ-Janer Award for Excellence in Creative Research. In 2005, Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity was named a History Book Club Selection and the winner of the Mary Lawton Hodges Prize in Southern Studies, and The Brown Decision, Jim Crow and Southern Identity earned Cobb the Georgia Author of the Year Award in History. Georgia Odyssey is listed as one of the Top 25 Books by Living Georgians by the Georgia Center for the Book. In 1992, Cobb garnered the McClemore Award (Mississippi, History); was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award (History); the Herbert Hoover Prize (U.S. History); and the Owsley Prize (Southern History) with The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity.
Alfred Corn “has distinguished himself as one of the most original poets writing in the United States,” according to his biography in the New Georgia Encyclopedia. His first book of poems was released to literary praise. “By the time of his third and fourth collections, The Various Light (1980) and Notes from a Child of Paradise (1984), Corn was writing highly original, innovative poetry. Notes, for instance, while structurally modeled on Dante’s Divine Comedy, is an autobiographical piece that stands as the only long poem in American literature to record a history of intellectual life and the counterculture in the United States during the turbulent 1960s.” Corn has gone on to be recognized as a major voice in gay literature.
Corn has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets. He has taught at a variety of universities.
Eugenia Price is on the list of 25 books every Georgian should read, according to the Georgia Center for the Book. Best known as a writer of historical fiction, Price was awarded a Governor’s Award in the Humanities in 1988 for her novels which helped to preserve the history of coastal Georgia.
Price began writing for daytime serials at 23, starting her own production company in 1945. She became well-known in the radio broadcast business, leading to her next career as an inspirational speaker and author. During her first visit to the St. Simon’s Island in 1961, Price became captivated by the story of a young minister on St. Simon’s in the 1880s and began research for a novel.
“What was to be one novel … turned into three, and with the St. Simons trilogy – her first fiction – Price defined herself as a historical novelist who devoted months, sometimes years, to researching her subjects and the era in which they lived,” according to the New Georgia Encyclopedia.
Kevin Young will begin serving as director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in December, and is currently the Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English at Emory University. He has written six poetry collections, edited five more, and is widely regarded as one of the leading poets of his generation.
Since 2005, Young has served as curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, a 75,000-volume collection of rare and modern poetry housed at Emory. In 2008 he was also named Curator of Literary Collections and has continued to add to the growing collection at Emory’s Rose Library, which holds the archives of Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney and British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, among other highly regarded writers.
Young’s honors include a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and an honorary doctorate from Beloit College.
Biographical information is available at: www.Georgiaencyclopedia.org
For more information or to nominate a Georgia writer: http://www.georgiawritershalloffame.org/