“Personal in My Memory”
The South in Popular Film
by some of our favorite writers and filmmakers
with an introduction by Godfrey Cheshire

Alice Walker, Allan Gurganus, Randall Kenan, Joe Flora, Kenneth Turan, Elizabeth Spencer, and Andrew Garrison tell how their favorite Southern films marked them indelibly.

“We have two imaginary kingdoms. One, ‘the South,’ exists primarily in song, oral traditions and folkways, native art and literature. The other, ‘Hollywood,’ creates mass-produced audiovisual entertainments for American and world audiences, and develops its own mythology.”

Godfrey Cheshire is a film critic, journalist, and the writer-director of Moving Midway, a documentary about his family’s North Carolina plantation.

Renowned author, essayist, and poet Alice Walker is the author, most recently, of a collection of poems, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing (2010), and the memoir, The Chicken Chronicles (2011).

Allan Gurganus is the author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, The Practical Heart, and other fiction. He just wrote and narrated the BBC’s “A House Divided: Poetry of the American Civil War.” Gurganus’s novel-in-progress is “The Erotic History of a Southern Baptist Church.”

Randall Kenan is the author of several works, including Let the Dead Bury Their Dead and Other Stories and The Fire This Time, and the editor of The Cross of Redemption: The Uncollected Writings of James Baldwin, for which he wrote the introduction. He is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Kenneth Turan is film critic for the Los Angeles Times and National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition.” His latest book is Free For All: Joe Papp, the Public and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told.

Joe Flora is professor emeritus of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Independent filmmaker Andrew Garrison teaches production at the University of Texas. His current project, Trash Dance, is a feature documentary about the collaboration between a choreographer and employees of the City of Austin’s Department of Solid Waste Services.

Elizabeth Spencer’s writing has received numerous awards, including the Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from The Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters.