Equal Justice Initiative founder to headline 2019 Southern Voices Festival

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Bryan Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, will be the headline speaker for the 2019 Southern Voices Festival at the Hoover Public Library, library officials recently announced.

Stevenson will be the keynote speaker on Friday, Feb. 22, the fourth day of a five-day annual celebration of writing, music and art, now it in its 27th year.

Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative is an organization committed to ending mass incarceration and what it deems excessive punishment in the United States, challenging racial and economic injustice, and protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in America.

Under his leadership, the organization has won major legal challenges to what it believes were excessive and unfair sentencing practices, exonerated death row prisoners, confronted abuse of incarcerated and mentally ill people and aided children who were prosecuted as adults.

Lead speakers for the Southern Voices authors conference on Saturday, Feb. 23, are Alabama native and Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Bragg and bestselling author Melanie Benjamin from Chicago. Other authors scheduled to speak Saturday include J.T. Ellison, Patti Callahan Henry, Roger Johns, David Joy, Gin Phillips and Lori Roy.

The Southern Voices Festival begins on Tuesday, Feb. 19, with a free reception and lecture by three artists involved with the Cahaba River Watershed Project.

Printmaker Scott Stephens, media artist Elisabeth Pellathy and sculptor Lee Somers collaborated to explore the Cahaba River’s ecological and geological features and how they have shaped the economic and social history of the watershed. Their prints feature images derived from drawing, photography, 3D scanning of natural objects, and 3D modeling from original maps and diagrams.

Stephens and Somers are art faculty at the University of Montevallo, and Elisabeth Pellathy teaches at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

On Wednesday and Thursday, Feb. 20-21, Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls will perform as the festival’s featured musician.

Saliers and musical partner Amy Ray gained national prominence with their breakout “Indigo Girls” folk album in 1989 and went on to win a Grammy Award and rack up a slew of gold and platinum records.

But Saliers in August 2017, 30 years into her musical career, released her first solo album called “Murmuration Nation.” The album combines her love of folk storytelling with the soulful R&B music that surrounded and inspired her in the predominantly African-American community where she grew up in New Haven, Connecticut.

Tickets for Southern Voices go on sale Jan. 4.

Here is more about Stevenson and the speakers in the Saturday authors conference:

Bryan Stevenson

Stevenson, who is a graduate of Harvard Law School and a law professor at the New York University School of Law, has successfully argued several cases in the U.S. Supreme Court and won a ruling that declared mandatory life-without-parole sentences for children 17 or younger as unconstitutional.

He and his staff also have won reversals, relief or release for more than 125 prisoners on death row, according to the Equal Justice Initiative website.

Carrie Steinmehl, the technology coordinator at the Hoover Public Library and Southern Voices chairwoman, said the library staff chose Stevenson as the headliner for this year’s festival because they wanted an Alabama author in conjunction with 2019 being the state’s bicentennial celebration and felt Stephenson had done a lot of amazing things in the past year.

Chief among those was the April 2018 opening of The National Memorial for Peace and Injustice and Legacy Museum in Montgomery.

The memorial is on a 6-acre site atop a rise overlooking Montgomery and acknowledges the racial terror lynchings of more than 4,400 African-American men, women and children who were hanged, burned alive, shot, drowned or beaten to death by white mobs between 1877 and 1950.

The museum, which is on the site of a former warehouse where black people were enslaved in Montgomery, uses interactive media, sculptures and exhibits to immerse visitors in the sights and sounds of the domestic slave trade, racial terrorism, the Jim Crow South and the world’s largest prison system.

Steinmehl said Stevenson will discuss his work with the Equal Justice Initiative during his Friday night talk, as well as his book, “Just Mercy,” a New York Times bestseller that tells the story of the organization, the people the group represents and the importance of confronting injustice.

The book is being made into a movie starring Brie Larson, Jamie Foxx and Michael B. Jordan.

Rick Bragg

Southern Voices guests for years have been asking library staff to bring Bragg to the festival. “We know he will be a big hit with our audience,” Steinmehl said.

Bragg is best known for his books “All Over but the Shoutin,’” “Ava’s Man,” and “The Prince of Frogtown,” a series of stories about his family and growing up in the Deep South. His latest book, “The Best Cook in the World: Tales from My Momma’s Table,” is described as an entertaining tribute to his mother that also includes 74 Bragg family recipes for classic Southern dishes.

He is a former journalist who worked for The Anniston Star, The Birmingham News and The St. Petersburg Times, and he won the Pulitzer in feature writing for his stories about contemporary America for The New York Times. He now is a journalism and creative media professor at the University of Alabama and a regular contributor to Garden & Gun magazine.

Melanie Benjamin

Benjamin is the author of “The Swans of Fifth Avenue,” which is about Truman Capote and his society swans, and “The Aviator’s Wife,” which is about Anne Morrow Lindbergh.

She also wrote “The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb,” the story of the 32-inch tall Lavinia Warren Stratton, a star during the Gilded Age and “Alice I Have Been,” which was inspired by the life of Alice Hargreaves Liddell, the real-life “Alice in Wonderland.”

Benjamin’s latest historical fiction tale, “The Girls in the Picture,” is about the creative partnership between two of Hollywood’s earliest female legends — screenwriter Frances Marion and superstar Mary Pickford.

After raising two sons, Benjamin pursued her writing career. She wrote a parenting column for a magazine, published short stories and wrote two contemporary novels under her real name, Melanie Hauser, before getting into historical fiction.

J.T. Ellison

Ellison, who is from Nashville, once worked in the White House as an assistant to a nuclear physicist who served as a science advisor to President George H.W. Bush. She later worked in the U.S. Department of Commerce and as a financial analyst and marketing director for several defense and aerospace contractors before launching into writing professionally.

She has written crime and psychological thriller series featuring Nashville homicide Detective Taylor Jackson and medical examiner Dr. Samantha Owens. She also co-writes the “A Brit in the FBI” series with New York Times bestselling author Catherine Coulter.

In 2015, she was named cohost of the Emmy Award-winning literary television show “A Word on Words.” Her latest novel is “Tear Me Apart,” the story of a mother who is willing to do anything to protect her daughter.

Patti Callahan Henry

Henry grew up in Philadelphia as the daughter of a Presbyterian minister and learned early the value of storytelling. She is a New York Times bestselling author, has penned 13 novels and now lives in Mountain Brook.

Her contemporary Southern fiction novels centering on women navigating family life and romantic relationships have won her much praise. She has been a finalist in The Townsend Prize for Fiction, an Indie Next Pick, an OKRA pick and has been nominated multiple times for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Novel of the Year.

Henry’s newest novel, “Becoming Mrs. Lewis,” came out in October and is her first foray into historical fiction. It tells the story of the friendship and love between Joy Davidman and C.S. Lewis.

Roger Johns

Johns is a former corporate lawyer, retired college professor and the author of the Wallace Hartman mysteries “Dark River Rising” and “River of Secrets.

He is the 2018 Georgia Detective/Mystery Author of the Year, was a nominee for the 2018 Killer Nashville Readers’ Choice Award a finalist for the 2018 Silver Falchion Award for best police procedural. He also co-authors the MurderBooks blog with four other crime fiction writers.

During his nearly two decades as a professor, he served on the editorial staffs of several academic publications and won numerous awards and recognitions for his teaching and scholarly writing. He lives in the Atlanta area.

David Joy

Joy is a native of Charlotte who moved to the mountains of North Carolina when he was 18. His novels tell the stories of the men and women whose lives are tied to that land and its history, and “he’s got an awesome Southern accent,” Steinmehl said.

He is the author of the Edgar finalist novel “Where All Light Tends To Go,” as well as the novels “The Weight of This World” and “The Line That Held Us.”

His stories and essays have appeared in Time, The New York Times Magazine, Garden & Gun and The Bitter Southerner and have been nominated for awards such as the Pushcart Prize.

Gin Phillips

Phillips was born in Montgomery and graduated from Birmingham-Southern College with a degree in political journalism. She worked as a magazine writer for more than a decade, living in Ireland, New York and Washington, D.C., before returning to Alabama.

Her first novel, “The Well and Mine,” won the 2009 Barnes & Noble Discover Award, enabling her to transition from her day job as a freelance magazine journalist into writing fiction full-time. She has written five novels, and her work has been sold in 29 countries.

Her latest novel, “Fierce Kingdom,” earned praise for its page-turning plot about an active shooter situation at the zoo while highlighting the daily stresses of parenthood. “It’s pretty gripping,” Steinmehl said, noting she hasn’t made it back to the zoo since reading it.

Lori Roy

Roy, a suspense and mystery writer from Florida, is a two-time Edgar Award winner for her novels “Bent Road” and “Let Me Die In His Footsteps.” Her novel “Until She Comes Home” was an Edgar finalist.

Her work has twice been named a New York Times Notable Crime Book and named an Editor’s Choice by The New York Times.

Her latest novel, “The Disappearing,” is set in an isolated Florida town, where the main character must come to terms with the crimes of her father, the former director of an infamous boys’ school, while dealing with the disappearance of one of her daughters.

Tickets

Tickets for An Evening with Bryan Stevenson cost $40, while the authors conference costs $45. Those tickets go on sale Jan. 4 from 8 to 10 a.m. via hooverlibrary.org/sv and by phone at 205-444-7888. After 10 a.m., tickets also may be bought in person at the Hoover Library Theatre box office at 200 Municipal Drive.

Tickets for Saliers’ performances are already on sale for $27.50 (plus processing fees) at thelibrarytheatre.com or by calling the box office at 205-444-7888 or visiting the box office in person.