Alumni Bookshelf

The Human Tradition in the Civil Rights Movement

by Susan Glisson
MA 1994

Susan M. Glisson, director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi, edited The Human Tradition in the Civil Rights Movement, a 320-page collection of biographies exploring the civil rights movement in the United States from Reconstruction to the 1970s. Glisson previously coauthored First Freedoms: A Documentary History of First Amendment Rights in America, published by Oxford University Press in 2006.

Grassroots: How to Run Your Own Campaign and Win!

The Bubba Handbook: An Insider's Guide to the Bubba Way of Life

by Fetzer Mills Jr.
MA 2000
Fetzer Mills Jr. is the author of two books—Grassroots: How to Run Your Own Campaign and Win! and The Bubba Handbook: An Insider’s Guide to the Bubba Way of Life. He covers Memphis and West Tennessee as a stringer for Reuters. His writing has been published in numerous magazines and newspapers including Salon.com, Sierra, Living Blues, Magnet, and Mojo. He wrote, directed, and, with his wife, produced the documentary film We Did It All Ourselves about the first successful voting rights case of the modern civil rights era.

Inside the Church of Flannery O'Connor:
Sacrament, Sacramental and the Sacred in Her Fiction

by John Parrish Peede
MA 1993
Jon Peede, director of literature for grants at the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C., publishes widely on Southern literature and joined literary scholar Joanne Halleran McMullen in editing the recent essay collection Inside the Church of Flannery O’Connor: Sacrament, Sacramental, and the Sacred in Her Fiction. “The Southern Studies program provided a remarkable exposure to multiple disciplines while still insisting on a strong foundation in one or more graduate fields,” Peede said. “I credit much of my professional career—as a book editor, college communications director and now NEA literature director—to the mentors I studied under in Southern Studies.”

African American History for Dummies

by Ronda Racha Penrice
Ronda Racha Penrice, who enrolled in the Southern Studies graduate program after receiving her BA from Columbia University, is a freelance writer who lives in Atlanta and currently contributes to various Afrocentric magazines and Web sites. Her first book, African American History for Dummies, was published in April 2007 to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown. “April itself is a significant month,” she writes, “because of M.L.K.’s assassination, the Civil War’s beginning and ending, Hank Aaron’s breaking Babe Ruth’s record, and Jackie Robinson’s Major League Baseball debut.”

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