HANK!

From the Alabama Writer's Forum:

Pulitzer Prize Board awards special citation to Hank Williams

Hank Williams The Pulitzer Prize Board awarded a posthumous Special Citation to Alabama native and country music legend Hank Williams for his lifetime achievement as a musician, Columbia University announced on April 12. The citation praises Williams for "his craftsmanship as a songwriter who expressed universal feelings with poignant simplicity and played a pivotal role in transforming country music into a major musical and cultural force in American life." "Williams, who died in 1953 at age 29, was noted for writing and singing songs that reflected the hopes and struggles of everyday Americans, and his compositional skill and fusion of genres, experts say, became the measure by which country music is judged," said Columbia University in a press release announcing the citation. Williams is remembered for penning such standards as "Your Cheatin' Heart," "Cold Cold Heart," "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," and "Jambalaya." Born near Georgiana, Williams later moved to Montgomery, where he began his career at radio station WSFA. He is buried in Oakwood Annex Cemetery in Montgomery. For the complete list of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize Award Winners, visit www.pulitzer.org.

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.

SCENE: Alabama Book Festival - Montgomery AL 4/18

On Saturday, April 18, more than fifty fiction and nonfiction writers, poets, artists, illustrators, playwrights, and children's writers will converge on the grounds of Old Alabama Town for the fourth annual Alabama Book Festival (ABF). The state-wide literary event will kick off readings and activities at 10 a.m. and go until 5 p.m. The event is free and open to all.

This year's festival will include readings and signings by Harper Lee Award and Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Bragg, Alabama's beloved Kathryn Tucker Windham, acclaimed photographer Beth Maynor Young, and chef Frank Stitt. A dedicated children's area will feature Magic Tree House author Mary Pope Osborne, among others.

Again this year, the Alabama Writers' Forum will sponsor the Poetry South/West Tent on the grounds of its Haigler House headquarters.

A special concluding event from 4 to 5 p.m. will feature the national debut of Warren St. John's new book, Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, An American Town.

April is National Poetry Month. Celebrate at events such as the Alabama Book Festival, the Montevallo Literary Festival, the Limestone Dust Poetry Festival, and the Alabama Writers Symposium.