Editor’s note: Tomas Tranströmer received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature on October 6.
I first met Monica and Tomas Tranströmer in 1983, in Houston. I had left my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, to attend a graduate writing program and nominated myself to pick them up at the airport. We immediately had a connection, since I had met Robert Bly in the 1970s and published a special feature on his poetry in Aura Literary Arts Review, a magazine I edited for the English Department of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. They were delighted as their close relationship with Bly dated back to the 1960s. Read More…
Editor’s Note: Dr. Elaine Hughes, Professor Emerita of English at the University of Montevallo, received the Alabama Humanities Award on September 26, 2011. Following is a transcript of her acceptance speech.
My life-long love of literature and libraries began when I was ten years old. That was the summer I had resolved to read a book a day. The public library in my home town in west Jefferson County consisted of a small oak book case in the living room of Miss Mamie West, second grade teacher, who encouraged students to frequent her home library when school was not in session. Each morning I would get on my bicycle and pedal up Highway 78 West to Miss Mamie’s house, select my book, and scurry home to begin reading. This particular morning, Miss Mamie discovered I had read all the selections in the youth materials, and the bookmobile had not been by to replenish her shelves. So she dutifully went through the titles and selected one she thought appropriate for me to read, The Bishop’s Mantle. When I read the first sentence in the novel—“The priest was surprised when he opened the door to find an infant on the front steps of the rectory.”—a new world was opened for me. Read More…
June 4, 2011
For the past few days, I pondered what brought Wayne Greenhaw and me (and Bill Baxley for that matter) together today. Different people from different places with different careers. After considerable speculation, I settled on one unifying movement containing many separate parts. Born only a year apart, the three of us left the culture into which we were born during our teenage years and entered through the gates of history into the most powerful freedom movement of the twentieth century. If the Depression and the Second World War defined our parents’ generation, the Civil Rights Movement defined ours. Read More…
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