Yellowhammer Press

For fans of Old Time and Appalachian music, Smithsonian Folkways’ Backroads to Cold Mountain is a must have.  Compiled by musicologist John Cohen, it’s a great collection of mountain music from the early days of audio recording.  Less intimidating than the sprawling Goodbye, Babylon or the Anthology of American Folk Music, it’s a great primer [...]

There is no monolith of Southern literature.  We’re not all Faulkners, or Wolfes, or McCullers or Weltys, though most readers of Southern work  know those names by heart as part of the Greatest Hits of Southern Literature.  The casual reader often regards Southern writing not simply as the product of a region but as a [...]

Walter Inglis Anderson, the reclusive and troubled artist from Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, is certainly not as famous as he deserves to be.  Though the museum that bears his name makes no mention of the exhibit on their site, Coastal Artists Reflect on Walter Inglis Anderson asks artists from the coastal South to reflect upon and [...]

In a review aptly titled Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching, philosopher and critic (and a man upon whose work much of my graduate studies orbited) Terry Eagleton says the following of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion: “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have [...]

“Celebrating Contemporary Art in Alabama: The Nature of Being Southern” opened this week at the Troy Pike Cultural Arts Complex. Forty-one artists who live and work in Alabama are exhibiting their work, all of whom have received Artist Fellowships from the Alabama State Council on the Arts. Notable artists include Caroline Davis, whose background in [...]

It is my pleasure to introduce the Art section of Yellowhammer Press, offering the first online space for contemporary and emerging Southern art (or at least the first one that takes a few steps away from ceramic roosters). We look forward to exploring issues of Southern identity and its impact on artists and their work [...]

In one of those rare moments of clarity, I awoke this morning remembering The Republic of Winston.  Having had a discussion with a friend last night about the hair-pulling over the Jones County story, I suddenly remembered a similar tale from Alabama.  Often referred to as The Republic of Winston, Winston County, Alabama was an [...]

No one has written a more definitive account of the American Civil War than the late Shelby Foote, whose sprawling narrative is a foundational text for anyone with an interest in such things.  His prose is remarkably gentle and engaging, even when his subject matter is the bloodiest moment in American history.  His 3-volume work [...]