Southern Reckoning

Dr. Stephen Daniel Arnoff is the CEO of the Fuchsberg Jerusalem Center, a religious and cultural center in the heart of Jerusalem. Writing and teaching at the nexus of myth, spirituality, and popular music, he is releasing the book About Man and God and Law: The Spiritual Wisdom of Bob Dylan in 2022 in celebration of Dylan's 81st birthday, as well as the enduring possibility that the music we love can change and even save our world.

Rachel M. Hanson is the author of The End of Tennessee: A Memoir (University of South Carolina Press, 2024).

Her nonfiction has won Best of the Net and earned Notable Mention in Best American Essays. Her essays can be found in Creative Nonfiction, The Iowa Review, Ninth Letter, North American Review, South Dakota Review, American Literary Review, and many other literary journals. Her poetry was selected for Best New Poets and has been published in The Minnesota Review, Juked, New Madrid, and elsewhere. Excerpts from her novel-in-progress appear in Joyland Magazine.

A recipient of the Olive B. O'Connor Fellowship in Nonfiction at Colgate University, Rachel holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Utah, and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Missouri. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Carolina Asheville.

Punch Bucket Lit: A West Asheville Reading Series and Literary Organization

Phoebe Zerwick is an award-winning investigative journalist, narrative writer, and college professor. Her writing has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine; National Geographic; The Nation; the Winston-Salem Journal; and Glamour, among other publications. Her work has been recognized by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, Investigative Reporters and Editors, the Society of Professional Journalists, Columbia University, and the North Carolina Press Association and featured in the HBO documentary The Trials of Darryl Hunt. A graduate of the Journalism School at Columbia University, Zerwick is the director of the journalism program at Wake Forest University, where she teaches writing and journalism, including courses taught at the law school in collaboration with the director of Wake Forest's Innocence & Justice Clinic.

Beyond Innocence: The Life Sentence of Darryl Hunt has been shortlisted for the Southern Book Prize in nonfiction.

Matthew Schwartz has told approximately 10,000 stories on television stations across the country for four decades. He has won more than 200 awards, including four New York Emmys and four regional Edward R. Murrow Awards for investigative reporting.

Some of Matthew’s memorable stories include an interview with “Son of Sam” serial killer David Berkowitz; the trials of mobster John Gotti; reports on the 9/11 attacks from Ground Zero; the crash two months later of American Airlines flight 587 in Queens, NY; and hundreds of reports on corruption, fraud and government waste. Matthew has confronted countless con artists, including a large ring of illegal fortune tellers.

He did a half-dozen interviews with a real estate developer who was not yet well known outside New York: Donald Trump.

He went undercover to catch a car dealership rolling back odometers and selling the cars as new. He did a series on pets dying in airplane cargo holds. It led to a federal law making air travel safer for pets.

Adam M. Rosen is the editor of (and a contributor to) a collection of essays about the cult film The Room, considered by many—fans and critics alike—to be “the worst movie ever made.” You Are Tearing Me Apart, Lisa!: The Year’s Work on The Room, the Worst Movie Ever Made was published by Indiana University Press on October 25, 2022, in anticipation of the film’s 20th anniversary year (2023). 

The book is the latest entrant in IUP’s celebrated The Year’s Work pop culture book series. In fact, it was inspired by The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies (2009), which went through two printings and was reviewed by the New York Times and Washington Post, among many other outlets.

Adam is also a nonfiction editor and freelance writer. He said this about himself, too: "Outside of books and writing I’m a bit of an urban planning and surface transit nerd. I’m the president of Connect Buncombe, a nonprofit advocating for greenways in my county, and I’m a member of the Rail Passengers Association, the national organization fighting for better passenger rail service and infrastructure in the U.S."

Frank Pommersheim is a well-known teacher, scholar, Tribal Justice, and poet, who has more than forty years of experience in the area of Indian Law and Policy. In 2019, he retired from the University of South Dakota Law School after 35 years.

Currently, he serves as a justice for the Santee Sioux, Crow Creek, Rosebud and Winnebago Tribes. In the past, he had been a justice for the Saginaw Chippewa, Lower Sioux, Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and the Grand Portage Chippewa. He has served as the chief justice of the Cheyenne River Appellate Court of Appeals for 31 years. In 2018, he was honored by the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe with a star quilt for his commitment to Indian law.

Tamara Saviano is a three-time GRAMMY nominee and took home the statue for producing 2004’s GRAMMY-winning Best Traditional Folk Album, Beautiful Dreamer: The Songs of Stephen Foster. She produced The Pilgrim: A Celebration of Kris Kristofferson in 2006 with Randy Scruggs. In 2012, Saviano’s GRAMMY-nominated This One’s For Him: A Tribute to Guy Clark won the Americana Music Association’s Album of the Year Award. 

Without Getting Killed or Caught: The Life and Music of Guy Clark, Saviano’s biography on legendary songwriter Guy Clark, was released by Texas A&M University Press in 2016 and won the Belmont Award from the International Country Music Conference for the best writing on country music that year. Saviano’s documentary feature on Clark, Without Getting Killed or Caught, is the winner of SXSW’s 2021 Louis Black Lonestar Award and the 2021 Rockport Film Festival’s Audience Award.

Saviano produced iconic songwriter Kris Kristofferson’s double-CD set The Cedar Creek Sessions and the album was nominated for a GRAMMY for Best Americana album in 2017. Saviano has worked with the legendary songwriter for 19 years, is a caretaker for the Kristofferson legacy, and runs the indie record label, KK Records. 

Kristofferson wrote the Foreword to Saviano’s memoir, The Most Beautiful Girl: A True Story of a Dad, a Daughter and the Healing Power of Music. The book was listed as one of the best books of 2014 on the prestigious Chicago Review of Books.

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall is Julia Cherry Spruill Professor Emeritus at UNC-Chapel Hill and founding director of the university’s Southern Oral History Program. She is past president of the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association and founding president of the Labor and Working Class History Association.

Awards for her most recent book, Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America (2019), include the 2020 PEN America/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography; the Summersell Prize for the best book on the history of the American South; the PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers for outstanding work by a trade press; the Bell Award from the Georgia Historical Society for the best book in Georgia history; the Charles S. Sydnor Award from the Southern Historical Association for the best book in southern history (co-winner); the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize from the Southern Association of Women Historians for the best book in southern women’s history (co-winner); and the Willie Lee Rose Prize from the Southern Association of Women Historians for the best book on any topic in southern history written by a woman (co-winner).

From 1965 to 1970, Taylor Pie was a member of the popular folk music band, Pozo Seco Singers, who achieved national commercial success with the hit song, “Time.” She helped launch the career of Don Williams, and she is director of A & R for PuffBunny Records.
The documentary, Nobody Famous, directed by Elizabeth Ahlstrom, tells Pie's story against the backdrop of the 60s folk scene and social upheavals of the time.

Pie is a 2015 inductee into the National Traditional Country Music Hall of Fame, and has recorded solo albums and penned songs covered by notable artists including John Conlee, The Forrester Sisters, Mickey Gilley, Terri Hendrix, The Oak Ridge Boys, Valerie Smith, Tanya Tucker, Williams, and Bette Midler, who used Pie’s song “Back in the Bars” in her “Clams on the Half-Shell Revue.”

Pie is currently CEO and head of A&R for PuffBunny Records, a Texas/Tennessee based indie folk legacy label where her music is now archived.

J. Brent Morris is an award-winning historian and scholar, with specializations in South Carolina history, the history of the American South, and African American history. At Clemson, he is Professor of History. Previously, he was Professor of History and founding director of the Institute for the Study of the Reconstruction Era at the University of South Carolina Beaufort.

Dr. Morris has served as consultant and/or board member for many public-facing projects including the International African American Museum, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Park Service, and the South Carolina Historical Association. His scholarship, teaching, and service projects have been supported by over $1.8 million in grants and fellowships.

Brent was the 2010 recipient of the South Carolina Historical Society's Malcolm C. Clark Award, was named 2016 University of South Carolina Breakthrough Star for Research and Scholarship, and was awarded the 2018 Award of the Order of the South, the highest honor bestowed by the Southern Academy of Letters, Arts, and Sciences (previous awardees include Eudora Welty and James Dickey). From 2020-2022 he was a USC System Academic Leadership Fellow.

Great Dismal Swamp sprawls over 2,000 square miles and spills over parts of Virginia and North Carolina. From the early seventeenth century, the nearly impassable Dismal frustrated settlement. However, what may have been an impediment to the expansion of slave society became an essential sanctuary for many of those who sought to escape it. In the depths of the Dismal, thousands of maroons—people who had emancipated themselves from enslavement and settled beyond the reach of enslavers—established new lives of freedom in a landscape deemed worthless and inaccessible by whites.

Dismal Freedom unearths the stories of these maroons, their lives, and their struggles for liberation. Drawing from newly discovered primary sources and archeological evidence that suggests far more extensive maroon settlement than historians have previously imagined, award-winning author J. Brent Morris uncovers one of the most exciting yet neglected stories of American history. This is the story of resilient, proud, and determined people who made the Great Dismal Swamp their free home and sanctuary and who played an outsized role in undermining slavery through the Civil War.

David Maraniss is a New York Times best-selling author, fellow of the Society of American Historians, and visiting distinguished professor at Vanderbilt University. He has been affiliated with the Washington Post for more than forty years as an editor and writer, and twice won Pulitzer Prizes at the newspaper. In 1993 he received the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his coverage of Bill Clinton, and in 2007 he was part of a team that won a Pulitzer for coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting.

Christy Alexander Hallberg is the author of the award-winning novel ‘Searching For Jimmy Page’, from Livingston Press.

She is also the host of Rock is Lit: A Podcast About Rock Novels, from Pantheon Podcast Network.

Her short fiction, creative nonfiction, book reviews, and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as ‘North Carolina Literary Review’, ‘storySouth’, ‘Still: The Journal’, ‘Main Street Rag’, ‘Fiction Southeast’, ‘Riggwelter’, ‘Deep South Magazine’, ‘Eclectica’, ‘Litro’, ‘STORGY Magazine’, ‘Entropy’, and ‘Concho River Review’.

Her creative nonfiction essay “The Ballad of Evermore” was a finalist for the ‘Sequestrum’ 2020 Editor’s Reprint Award. Her flash story “Aperture” was chosen Story of the Month by ‘Fiction Southeast’ for October 2020, and selected by the editors of the Best Small Fictions anthology series for inclusion in the 2021 edition.

She teaches literature and writing online at East Carolina University, where she earned her BS and MA in English. She received her MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from Goddard College. In addition to teaching, Christy serves as Senior Associate Editor of ‘North Carolina Literary Review’. She is a former editor of #FridayFlash USA at ‘Litro’ magazine.

The Southern Oral History Program at UNC Chapel Hill will celebrate its 50th anniversary next year. I spoke with its founder, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, and the director, Seth Kotch, about doing oral history, the ideal of "objectivity" in history, and how the oral history program began and has changed.

Two leaders of the women's suffrage movement, drafted the first version of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in 1923. The version approved by Congress in 1972 and sent to the states reads:

“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

I talked with Jimmie Cochran Pratt, Lynne Joshi, and Roberta Madden of the League of Women Voters of the status of the ERA today and why it matters to democracy in the U.S.

Since voting is on our minds, this episode is an interview with Suzanne Fisher, Barbara Paterick, and Kathleen Crampton of the League of Women Voters. I wanted to learn more about the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) and to discuss the Electoral College. Even though these are midterm elections, issues of voting - how it works and doesn't, which votes are counted, direct versus indirect elections, and voter fraud - are a few of the topics we discussed.

To learn more about the NPVIC, you can go to:

I spoke with Dr. Emma Southon today on Southern Reckoning about her latest book, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome. We also talked about true crime, writing history, and Hilary Mantel’s influence on historical fiction.