Contemporary Southern Writers To Read Right Now

Ann Beattie

Novelist and short story writer Ann Beattie was born in Washington, D.C, and grew up in the Chevy Chase area. Her most recent work includes the collections The State We're In: Maine Stories (2015) and The Accomplished Guest (2017). Her latest novel, A Wonderful Stroke of Luck was published in 2019. Beattie's work has been included in several O. Henry Prize Story Collections as well as The Best American Short Stories of the Century.

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Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry, a prolific poet, essayist, novelist, and farmer, explores the intersections between agriculture and the individual. Berry's popular Port William novels are located in a fictional Kentucky town and include The Memory of Old Jack (1974), Jayber Crow (2000), and Hannah Coulter (2004), among others. Berry was born in Henry County, Kentucky, and still lives in his home state.

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Sarah M. Broom

Sarah M. Broom's first book, The Yellow House (2019), is a sweeping memoir tracing her family's history in the yellow New Orleans East house they called home. The book was awarded the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Broom, a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, divides her time between New York and New Orleans.

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Jericho Brown

Jericho Brown is a poet and writer from Shreveport, Louisiana. His most recent collection, The Tradition 2019), was a National Book Award Finalist in 2019 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2020. His earlier work includes Please (2008), The New Testament (2014). He is currently an associate professor of English at Emory University and is also the director of the institution's creative writing program.

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Casey Cep

Casey Cep grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. She is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where a piece she reported unearthed the story that would become her first book, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee (2019). The book examines Harper Lee's life in the context of an Alabama trial that took place in the 1970s—long after the best-selling debut that came with 1960's To Kill a Mockingbird—and was a story Lee struggled for years to write.

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Kate DiCamillo

Acclaimed children’s book author Kate DiCamillo was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but grew up in Florida, where she moved when she was five years old. She has written more than 25 books, including Because of Winn-Dixie (2000), The Tale of Despereaux (2003), Flora & Ulysses (2013), and The Tiger Rising (2001), and has twice been awarded the Newbery Medal.

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Beth Ann Fennelly

Poet Beth Ann Fennelly served as the poet laureate of Mississippi from 2016 to 2021. She is based in Mississippi, where she teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Mississippi. She has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and has also been included in The Best American Poetry Series. In addition to her poetry, she has also co-authored a novel, a work of nonfiction, and a book of “micro-memoirs.”

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Charles Frazier

Charles Frazier’s novels include Cold Mountain (1997)–which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1997 and was adapted into a film of the same name–Thirteen Moons (2006), Nightwoods (2011), and Varina (2018), as well as his soon-to-be-released fifth novel, The Trackers (2023). Frazier was born in Asheville, North Carolina.

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Nikki Giovanni

Acclaimed poet Nikki Giovanni was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. She was a major figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and has written twelve books of children's literature as well as many poetry collections, including 1998’s Love Poems and 2020’s Make Me Rain.

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Yaa Gyasi

The writer Yaa Gyasi was born in Ghana and grew up in Huntsville, Alabama. She published her acclaimed debut novel, Homegoing, in 2016, and won the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the American Book Award. She was also named one of the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 in 2016. Her most recent novel, Transcendent Kingdom, was published in 2020.

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Terrance Hayes

Born in Columbia, South Carolina, poet Terrance Hayes is the author of the collection Lighthead (2010), which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2010. His recent books, How to Be Drawn (2015) and American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018), were both finalists as well. Hayes is currently a professor on the faculty at New York University.

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Brandon Hobson

Brandon Hobson's most recent book is The Removed (2021). His 2018 novel Where the Dead Sit Talking, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. Set in Oklahoma in the 1980s, the book tells the story of a Cherokee teenager navigating the foster care system. Hobson's other books include Deep Ellum (2014) and Desolation of Avenues Untold (2015). Hobson, a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, teaches creative writing at New Mexico State University and is a writing mentor at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

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Silas House

A native of Laurel County, Kentucky, Silas House set his first few novels in fictional Crow County. He was a mail carrier before he began publishing his novels, the first of which was Clay's Quilt (2001), followed by A Parchment of Leaves (2003) and others. Southernmost was published in 2018, and House's most recent novel, Lark Ascending, was published in 2022. His literary work also includes nonfiction, short stories, essays, and plays. He lives in Kentucky.

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Ladee Hubbard

Ladee Hubbard’s works include the story collection The Last Suspicious Holdout and Other Stories (2022) and the novels The Rib King (2021) and The Talented Ribkins (2017). She has been the recipient of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction. Currently based in New Orleans, Hubbard was born in Massachusetts and raised in both the U.S. Virgin Islands and Florida.

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Tayari Jones

Tayari Jones, who was born in Atlanta and still calls the city home, wrote the novels Leaving Atlanta (2002), The Untelling (2005), Silver Sparrow (2011), and An American Marriage (2018), which was published to wide acclaim and won the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction. Jones is on the English and creative writing faculty at Emory University and is also an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.

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Barbara Kingsolver

Born in Annapolis, Maryland, and raised in rural Kentucky, Barbara Kingsolver traveled the world before moving to southwestern Virginia, where she now lives. Her work includes poetry, essays, and novels, including the bestsellers The Poisonwood Bible (1998), Prodigal Summer (2000), Flight Behavior (2012), and Unsheltered (2018).

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Kiese Laymon

Kiese Laymon was born in Jackson, Mississippi. He is the author of a novel, Long Division: A Novel (2013); a collection of essays, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays (2013); and a memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir (2018), which won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Laymon is currently the Hubert H. McAlexander Chair of English at the University of Mississippi, and he is the recipient of a 2020-2021 Radcliffe Fellowship.

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Attica Locke

Texas-born writer and producer Attica Locke has written an array of page-turning crime thrillers set in and around the South, including Black Water Rising (2009); Bluebird, Bluebird (2017); and Heaven, My Home (2019). As a television and film writer, she has also brought many popular projects to the screen, including Empire, When They See Us, and Little Fires Everywhere.

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Mesha Maren

Mesha Maren is from Alderson, West Virginia, and her debut novel, Sugar Run, is set in a fictionalized county in her home state. Her short stories and essays have been published widely, including in Tin House, The Oxford American, The Guardian, and The Southern Review. Maren is currently an Assistant Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Duke University, and she lives between North Carolina and West Virginia, where she is a National Endowment of the Arts Writing Fellow at the federal prison camp in her hometown.

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Bobbie Ann Mason

Bobbie Ann Mason was raised on a dairy farm in Mayfield, Kentucky, and many of her stories are set in western Kentucky. Her work spans the genres, and her 1999 memoir, Clear Springs, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Most recently, Patchwork: A Bobbie Ann Mason Reader (2018) was published in celebration of her life's work so far.

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Cormac McCarthy

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Cormac McCarthy was raised in Tennessee and has lived in Spain, Texas, and New Mexico, where he currently resides. His novels include Blood Meridian (1985), All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Road (2006), and many others, including two released in 2022, Passenger and Stella Maris.

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Mary Miller

Born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, Mary Miller is the author of two short story collections, Big World (2009) and Always Happy Hour (2017), and two novels, The Last Days of California (2014) and Biloxi (2019). Her work has appeared in The Paris Review and Oxford American. She currently lives in Mississippi.

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Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett was born in Los Angeles and moved with her family to Nashville, Tennessee, when she was a child. She still lives and writes in Music City, where she co-owns the beloved local bookstore Parnassus Books. Her recent novels include Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and the upcoming Tom Lake (2023).

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Mary Laura Philpott

Nashville-based writer Mary Laura Philpott's most recent book, I Miss You When I Blink (2019), is a memoir in essays and was a finalist for the 2019 Southern Book Prize in Nonfiction. Philpott's work appears both on the page and on the airwaves; she is the cohost of A Word on Words, a Nashville Public Television program in which she interviews writers and has conversations about books. Her forthcoming collection of essays is called Bomb Shelter (2022).

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Ron Rash

The novelist Ron Rash was born in South Carolina and grew up in North Carolina, where he still lives. Rash is currently a professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina, as well as the author of novels, books of short stories, and poetry collections. His novels, many of which are set in southern Appalachia, include The Risen (2016), Above the Waterfall (2015), The Cove (2012), and Serena (2008), among others.

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Maurice Carlos Ruffin

Born and raised in New Orleans, Maurice Carlos Ruffin published his debut novel, the Southern-set satire We Cast a Shadow, in 2019. It was a finalist for The PEN/Open Book Award and was long-listed for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Ruffin is an assistant professor of creative writing at Louisiana State University, and he is also the 2020-2021 John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence at The University of Mississippi.

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Karen Russell

The short story collection Orange World and Other Stories (2019), is suffused with the strange and the fantastic—elements which can be found Karen Russell's earlier story collections St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (2006) and Vampires in the Lemon Grove and Other Stories (2013). Swamplandia! (2011), a novel about alligator wrestlers living off the Florida coast, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2012. Russell grew up in Miami, Florida, and now lives in Oregon.

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Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton grew up in New Orleans and made her literary debut in 2017 with the National Book Award-nominated novel A Kind of Freedom. The story spans three generations in a New Orleans family during the second half of the 20th century. Her second book, The Revisioners, was published in 2019, and her third, On the Rooftop, arrived in 2022.

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Lee Smith

Lee Smith was born in the mountains of Grundy, Virginia, and incorporates the landscape of her childhood into much of her work. Her books include a memoir, Dimestore: A Writer's Life (2016); short story collections; and the novels Guests on Earth (2013), On Agate Hill (2006), The Last Girls (2002), and Fair and Tender Ladies (1988), among others. Smith currently lives in North Carolina.

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Michael Farris Smith

Novelist Michael Farris Smith's books include The Hands of Strangers (2011), Rivers (2013), Desperation Road (2017), The Fighter (2018), and most recently, Blackwood (2020), which takes place in the fictional rural Mississippi town of Red Bluff, and Nick (2021), which is an exploration of the life of the narrator of The Great Gatsby. Smith was born in Mississippi, and he has set his last four novels in and around the state. His upcoming novel is Salvage This World, which will be published in 2023.

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Laurel Snyder

Laurel Snyder is a poet and children's book author from Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of many children's books, including My Jasper June (2019), Bigger Than a Bread Box (2011), and Penny Dreadful (2010). Her 2017 book, Orphan Island, was longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature. Snyder currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Natasha Trethewey

Acclaimed poet Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi. She served as the Poet Laureate of Mississippi and was appointed United States Poet Laureate in 2012 and 2013. Trethewey won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in recognition of her 2006 collection Native Guard. Her most recent publication is a memoir entitled Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir, which was published in 2020.

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Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler was born in Minnesota, grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, and now lives in Baltimore, Maryland. A prolific novelist, Tyler has written more than 20 novels, many of which are set in and around Maryland, including A Spool of Blue Thread (2015), which was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize, and Breathing Lessons (1988), which won the Pulitzer Prize. Her most recent book is French Braid, a novel published in 2022.

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Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward was born in California and grew up in DeLisle, Mississippi. Her novels include Where the Line Bleeds (2008); Salvage the Bones (2011); and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017). Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing were awarded the National Book Award for Fiction in 2011 and 2017, respectively. Ward also published the memoir Men We Reaped and edited the 2016 collection The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race. Ward is currently on the faculty at Tulane University.

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Bryan Washington

Bryan Washington's first book, Lot: Stories (2019), explores Houston, Texas, his hometown. He was recognized as one of the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 in 2019 and has written for The New Yorker and The Paris Review. Washington's second book, a novel entitled Memorial, was published in 2020.

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Nick White

Mississippi native Nick White published his debut collection of Southern-set short stories, Sweet & Low, in 2018. White's work also includes the novel How to Survive a Summer (2017), and pieces published in The Kenyon Review, Guernica, and LitHub, among other outlets. He is currently on the creative writing faculty at The Ohio State University.

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John Edgar Wideman

A writer whose career has spanned genres and decades, John Edgar Wideman was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His work includes novels as well as memoirs, short stories, and essays. Wideman's most recent book is American Histories, a collection of short stories about history, loss, and the legacy of slavery in America. Among Wideman's many honors is the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, a prize the writer won twice, and multiple O. Henry Awards.

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Kevin Wilson

Sewanee writer Kevin Wilson's books include the story collections Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (2009) and Baby, You're Gonna Be Mine (2018) and the novels The Family Fang (2011), which was adapted into a 2015 film; Perfect Little World (2017); and Nothing To See Here (2019). Wilson currently teaches creative writing at Sewanee: The University of the South. His most recent novel is Now Is Not the Time To Panic, which was published in 2022.

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De'Shawn Charles Winslow

Writer De'Shawn Charles Winslow grew up in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, and is currently based in Atlanta, Georgia. His debut novel, In West Mills, was published in 2019 and takes place in the fictional North Carolina town of West Mills. Following its publication, Winslow won the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. His second novel, Decent People, which is also set in the world of West Mills, was published in 2023.

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