Southern Writers Anthology Selection

Even though I’ve been “gone off up north” for twenty years, I lived my first thirty-three years in the Deep South and all of my fiction has focused on southern characters. I’m honored that southern fiction scholar Jean W. Cash, author of biographies of Flannery O’Connor and Larry Brown, selected me as one of nineteen authors to be featured in Twenty-First-Century Southern Writers: New Voices, New Perspectives published by the University Press of Mississippi. Kevin Catalano, whose excellent fiction deserves a wide audience and will earn him many accolades in the future, did a fine job with his essay “Joe Samuel Starnes: A Devoted Disciple of the Rough South Gospel” that explores my novels Calling, Fall Line, and Red Dirt.