Southern Storytellers

"Southern Storytellers" celebrates Southern identity through the eyes of contemporary creators of literature, music, film and television, including authors Jesmyn Ward, Michael Twitty, Angie Thomas and David Joy; poets Jericho Brown and Natasha Trethewey; songwriters Jason Isbell, Lyle Lovett, Tarriona “Tank” Ball, Adia Victoria, Amanda Shires and Justin Moore; songwriter/screenwriter/actor Billy Bob Thornton and songwriter/actress Mary Steenburgen; and screenwriters Qui Nguyen and Michael Waldron.

We're highlighting the music, literary, and film creators featured in the show. Read more about the literary creators below.

Literary

Learn more about the literary creators featured in "Southern Storytellers." Browse our recommended reading list and see the writers and works that influenced the creators.

Jericho Brown

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet

Influenced by: Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni

Books/poems: "The Tradition" (poetry collection)

Jericho Brown is the author of three collections of poetry: "The Tradition" (2019), a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry;  "The New Testament" (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets; and "Please" (New Issues, 2008), which won the 2009 American Book Award.

The New York Times Book Review notes his most recent collection "The Tradition": "In Brown’s poems, the body at risk — the infected body, the abused body, the black body, the body in eros — is most vulnerable to the cruelty of the world. But even in their most searing moments, these poems are resilient out of necessity, faithful to their account of survival, when survival is the hardest task of all: 'So the Bible says, in the beginning, / Blackness. I am alive.'"

About "Please," Terrance Hayes wrote, "This is the poetry of bloodship: the meaning of family, of love, of sexuality; the resonances of pain and the possibilities of redemption." Of "The New Testament," Craig Morgan Teicher said, in an NPR interview, "What’s most remarkable in these poems is that, while they never stop speaking through gritted teeth, never quite make the choice between hope and fear, they are always beautiful, full of a music that is a cross between the sinuous sentences of Carl Phillips, the forceful descriptions of Mark Doty, and hip rhythms of Terrance Hayes. They show Brown to be a part of a new guard of black and gay writers… unwilling in their writing to confine their identities. These poems offer an unlikely kind of hope: Brown’s ambivalence is evidence of a fragile belief in the possibility of change, of the will that makes change possible." And as Claudia Rankine simply puts it, Jericho Brown’s poems offer their readers a window into his "devastating genius."

Brown is the recipient of the Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland; he was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Hurston Wright Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The Best American Poetry.

Jericho Brown grew up in Louisiana and worked as a speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before earning his PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. He also holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Orleans and graduated magna cum laude from Dillard University.

David Joy

Southern Book Prize Winner/Author

Books: "Where All Light Tends to Go," "The Weight of This World," "When These Mountains Burn"

David Joy is the author of "When These Mountains Burn" (winner of the 2020 Dashiell Hammett Award), "The Line That Held Us" (winner of the 2018 Southern Book Prize), "The Weight Of This World," and "Where All Light Tends To Go" (Edgar finalist for Best First Novel). His stories and creative nonfiction have most recently appeared in Garden & Gun, The New York Times Magazine, and TIME. His fifth novel, "Those We Thought We Knew," will release this August. Joy lives in Tuckasegee, North Carolina.

Angie Thomas

New York Times Best Selling Author

Influenced by: Mildred D. Taylor

Books: "The Hate U Give," "Concrete Rose"

Angie Thomas was born and raised in Mississippi, but now calls Atlanta her home. She is a former teen rapper whose greatest accomplishment was an article about her in Right-On Magazine with a picture included. She holds a BFA in Creative Writing from Belhaven University and an unofficial degree in Hip Hop. She can also still rap if needed. She is an inaugural winner of the Walter Dean Myers Grant 2015, awarded by We Need Diverse Books. Her award-winning, acclaimed debut novel, "The Hate U Give," is a #1 New York Times bestseller and major motion picture from Fox 2000, starring Amandla Stenberg and directed by George Tillman, Jr. Her second novel, "On the Come Up," is on sale now.

Natasha Trethewey

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet

Poems/Books: "Meditation at Decatur Square," "Memorial Drive" (Memoir), "Native Guard"

Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014). She is the author of five collections of poetry, including "Native Guard" (2006) — for which she was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize — and, most recently, "Monument: Poems New and Selected" (2018); a book of non-fiction, "Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast" (2010); and a memoir, "Memorial Drive" (2020) an instant New York Times Bestseller. 

She is the recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Philosophical Society. In 2017 she received the Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities. A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets since 2019, Trethewey was awarded the 2020 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Prize in Poetry for Lifetime Achievement from the Library of Congress. In 2022 she was the William B. Hart Poet in Residence at the American Academy in Rome. Currently, she is Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University.

Michael W. Twitty

James Beard Award-Winning Author/Culinary Historian

Book: "The Cooking Gene"

Michael W. Twitty is a culinary historian and food writer living in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He blogs at Afroculinaria.com. He’s appeared on "Bizarre Foods America with Andrew Zimmern," "Many Rivers to Cross with Henry Louis Gates" and most recently "Taste the Nation" with "Top Chef"'s Padma Lakshmi.

HarperCollins released Twitty’s "The Cooking Gene," in 2017, tracing his ancestry through food from Africa to America and from slavery to freedom, a finalist for The Kirkus Prize and The Art of Eating Prize and a 3rd place winner of Barnes & Noble’s Discover New Writer’s Awards in Nonfiction. The Cooking Gene won the 2018 James Beard Award for best writing as well as book of the year, making him the first Black author so awarded. His piece on visiting Ghana in Bon Appetit was included in Best Food Writing in 2019 and was nominated for a 2019 James Beard Award. His next book, "Rice," a New York Times noted cookbook, became available through UNC Press in 2021. "Koshersoul," his follow-up to "The Cooking Gene," was published in August 2022 through HarperCollins and received the 2022 National Jewish Book Award. Michael has a hit spice line based on "The Cooking Gene" and a recent special guest appearance on Michelle Obama’s "Waffles and Mochi" show on Netflix. Michael can also be found on MasterClass online, where he teaches "Tracing Your Roots Through Food." Michael is a National Geographic Explorer, a TED fellow, and a member of the 2022 TIME 100 Next class. He served as a historical consultant on the FX adaptation of Octavia Butler's "Kindred."

Jesmyn Ward

National Book Award Winner/Author

Books: "Men We Reaped" (Memoir), "Sing, Unburied, Sing"

Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has received the MacArthur Genius Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency, the Strauss Living Prize, and the 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. She is the historic winner —first woman and first Black American — of two National Book Awards for Fiction for "Sing, Unburied, Sing" (2017) and "Salvage the Bones" (2011). 

She is also the author of the novel "Where the Line Bleeds" and the memoir "Men We Reaped," which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Media for a Just Society Award. She is currently a professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi.

Recommended Reading List

The selections below include works from the literary creators featured in "Southern Storytellers" and works from the writers who have influenced them.

The Tradition (poetry collection, Jericho Brown)

Where All Light Tends to Go (David Joy)

The Weight of This World (David Joy)

When These Mountains Burn (David Joy)

The Hate U Give (Angie Thomas)

Concrete Rose (Angie Thomas)

The Cooking Gene (Michael Twitty)

She Kills Monsters (screenplay, Qui Nguyen)

Raya and the Last Dragon (screenplay, Qui Nguyen)

Strange World (screenplay, Qui Nguyen)

Men We Reaped (memoir, Jesmyn Ward)

Sing, Unburied, Sing (Jesmyn Ward)

Meditation at Decatur Square (poem, Natasha Trethewey)

Memorial Drive (memoir, Natasha Trethewey)

Native Guard (Natasha Trethewey)

To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (Mildred D. Taylor)

The Optimist’s Daughter (Eudora Welty)

As I Lay Dying (William Faulkner)

The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (Maya Angelou)