Literature

For generations, the women of Gee's Bend have made quilts to keep a family warm, as a pastime accompanied by sharing and singing, or to memorialize loved ones. Today, the same quilts hang on museum walls as modern masterpieces of color and design. Inspired by these quilts and women who made them, award-winning author Patricia C. McKissack traveled to Alabama to learn their stories and brought back this beautiful collection of lyrical, interconnected vignettes.

Gee's Bend Experience: Poems and tidbits about life by quilter Tinnie Pettway 

Set in South Alabama The Second Head of Chocalata is a series of short stories written about a man and a boy. The author wrote a few of these short stories as the boy recalled tales the man had told him about the hunting and fishing adventures of his youth around the Mobile area. Then the author tells the boy's life as he grew up hunting, fishing, water skiing, and frog gigging in and about the rivers and marshes of the Mobile River Delta and Mobile Bay. Some of the stories are serious, some...

Amanda Walker is a longtime columnist with AL.com, the Wilcox Progressive Era in Camden, Alabama, several regional papers. Her writing explores the elusive ups and downs of everyday life. She weaves and dances along the heartstrings thread through us all. She can be quite opinionated and delightfully humorous.Her book "The Tears and Laughter of a Southern Voice Calling" is a collection of short stories, writing, and collumns based off of experiences from life growing up in the south. ...

The Tombigbee River flows through the history of Alabama and Mississippi, connecting the Black Prairie cotton belt of northeast Mississippi and west Alabama to Mobile and the Gulf of Mexico. In the early 1800s, it became the regional artery of commerce and trade, with steamboats carrying cotton to the port of Mobile and then returning upriver with farm supplies and consumer goods. Today, the "rollodores," who rolled cotton bales down slides to the decks of boats; the sunken logs, or "dead...

One shot fired deep in the pine forests of her youth was all it took to change Hattie's life forever. At the age of fourteen, Hattie learns that her mother, Addie, is dead, and her father, Hubbard, stands accused of Addie's murder, along with countless other shocking betrayals. Overnight, Hattie becomes mother to her three siblings while still very much a child herself. The life she had dreamt of now seems impossible to achieve. How will Hattie break away from the father who prevents her from...

This Bright Light of Ours offers a tightly focused insider’s view of the community-based activism that was the heart of the civil rights movement. A celebration of grassroots heroes, this book details through first-person accounts the contributions of ordinary people who formed the nonviolent army that won the fight for voting rights.Combining memoir and oral history, Maria Gitin fills a vital gap in civil rights history by focusing on the neglected Freedom Summer of 1965 when hundreds of...

Through Others' Eyes includes descriptions of traveling to and from Montgomery, but it focuses on the travelers' descriptions of Montgomery itself. The twenty-eight published accounts between 1825 and 1861 were written by Americans and Europeans with a variety of backgrounds. A few are as objective as can reasonably be expected considering the short durations of the writers' visits. Some are prone to display their preconceptions and prejudices. Most exaggerate-they had to make their books...

When The Dinner Bell Rings is a delightful collection of recipes and personal stories from Alabama's First Family and friends.Join Alabama's top hostess Patsy Riley as she presents recipes served during grand dinners at the Governor's Mansion. She's also collected recipes from the other state's executive residences. Proceeds from the sale of this cookbook will help maintain the Governor's Mansion as well as benefit the 1910 Farley-Hill House, a "sister" home next door to the mansion. ...

In 1910, Orville and Wilbur Wright opened the first American civilian flight school in Montgomery, Alabama. The Wright brothers hoped to find a climate warmer and more hospitable to flying than their company base of snowy Dayton, Ohio. Forward-thinking Montgomerians welcomed the Wrights and heralded the school as a way to rise above the shadow of the Civil War. Author Julie Hedgepeth Williams chronicles the short life of this flight school as seen mainly through the eyes of the Alabama press,...