RIP: Barry Hannah

The Alabama Writer's Forum remembers Barry Hannah: In Memoriam: Barry Hannah

Barry Hannah Author and educator Barry Hannah died at his home in Oxford, Miss., on March 1. He was 67. Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Mississippi, he published eight novels and four short story collections. His novels include Yonder Stands Your Orphan, High Lonesome, Bats Out of Hell, and Never Die. His novel Ray was written and set in Tuscaloosa, where Hannah helped bring the University of Alabama Creative Writing Program to national prominence during his tenure there. Hannah was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his short story collection High Lonesome. His first novel, Geronimo Rex, won the William Faulkner Prize and was nominated for the National Book Award. Airships, his collection of short stories about the Vietnam War, the Civil War, and the modern South, won the Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction Award. Hannah also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Robert Penn Warren Lifetime Achievement Award, a PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction, and a prestigious Award in Literature from the American Institute of Arts and Letters. "He was the rarest of things: He truly was an original," writer Brad Watson told the Tuscaloosa News. "Whatever his many influences, he had entirely digested them; they came out Barry Hannah." Watson studied creative writing with Hannah at the University of Alabama. The Alabama Writers' Forum, a partnership program of the Alabama State Council on the Arts, promotes writers and writing in Alabama, with an emphasis on arts education programs for young writers. If you're planning to be in or near Montgomery on 4/17, the AWF produced Alabama Book Festival takes place from 10 a.m-4 p.m downtown at Old Alabama Town. More than fifty authors, storytellers, publishers, illustrators, and performers will gather to celebrate reading, writing, and literature.