Reception: Southern Cultures Spring 2014 Issue, with Suzanne Jones

Please join us as we celebrate Southern Cultures‘s 20th anniversary with issue-release parties throughout the 2013-14 academic year. All events are free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.

The Spring 2014 issue takes a critical look at Kathryn Stockett’s bestseller The Help. A literary and film phenomenon, The Help has inspired ongoing debate, some controversy, and won many adoring fans. In essays, interviews, photography, and poetry, we explore what makes The Help so provocative and why its themes inspire both serious criticism and real affection.

We welcome Suzanne Jones, Chair of the Department of English, University of Richmond, as our special guest at the reception for the Spring 2014 Issue. Professor Jones will read from and discuss her essay on the varied public and scholarly response to The Help.

Suzanne Jones is professor of English and chair of the department at the University of Richmond. Her articles on twentieth century southern fiction and on women novelists have appeared in a variety of journals and collections. She is the author of Race Mixing: Southern Fiction since the Sixties (2004) and the editor of three collections of essays: Poverty and Progress in the U.S. South since 1920 with Mark Newman (2006), South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture with Sharon Monteith (2002) and Writing the Woman Artist: Essays on Poetics, Politics, and Portraiture (1991); and two collections of stories, Crossing the Color Line: Readings in Black and White (2000) and Growing Up in the South (1991, 2003).