Frye Gaillard did not set out to write this book. One day as he was thumbing through a cardboard box of his essays, columns, and profiles, he simply realized that he had done it. Each article told the story of a person standing against social injustice or exploring the pain and ambiguity of the human condition.By blending interviews and stories of well-known figures like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Sidney Poitier, Vine Deloria, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Jane Goodall with lesser-known her...

A fifty-year history of one community's battles with race in public educationThe Dream Long Deferred tells the fifty-year story of the landmark struggle for desegregation in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the present state of the city's public school system. Award-winning writer Frye Gaillard, who covered school integration for the Charlotte Observer, updates his earlier 1988 and 1999 editions of this work to examine the difficult circumstances of...

Prophet from Plains covers Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter's major achievements and setbacks in light of what has been at once his greatest asset and his greatest flaw: his stubborn, faith-driven integrity. Carter's remarkable postpresidency is still in the making; however, he has already redefined the role for all who follow him.Frye Gaillard, who wrote extensively about Carter at the Charlotte Observer, was among the first to take the Carter postpresidency...

Alabama’s great civil rights events in a compact and accessible narrative, paired with a practical guide to Alabama’s preserved civil rights sites and monumentsNo other state has embraced and preserved its civil rights history more thoroughly than Alabama. Nor is there a place where that history is richer. Alabama’s Civil Rights Trail tells of Alabama’s great civil rights events, as well as its lesser-known moments, in a compact and accessible narrative, p...

In the most deeply personal writing of his long career, award-winning author Frye Gaillard reflects on the life and work of his wife Nancy, who died of leukemia in 2018. Partly the memoir of a vibrant marriage, Live As If... tells the story of Nancy's work as a public school teacher, principal, and professor during a time of education under siege. "It's a story of what can go right," Gaillard says.

Cradle of Freedom puts a human face on the story of the black American struggle for equality in Alabama during the 1960s.While exceptional leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Fred Shuttlesworth, Ralph Abernathy, John Lewis, and others rose up from the ranks and carved their places in history, the burden of the movement was not carried by them alone. It was fueled by the commitment and hard work of thousands of everyday people who decided th...

"There are many different ways to remember the sixties," Frye Gaillard writes, "and this is mine. As future generations debate the meaning of the decade, I hope to offer a sense of how it felt to have lived it. A Hard Rain is one writer's reconstruction and remembrance of a transcendent era—one that, for better or worse, lives with us still."With A Hard Rain, Gaillard gives us a deeply personal history, bringing his keen storyteller's eye to this pivotal time in A...

The Gulf Coast villages of Bayou La Batre and Coden are two of Alabama’s most distinctive, with roots going back to the French settlements of the 18th century. For generations, the proud inhabitants of these communities have extracted their modest livings from the sea, sustained by a lesson handed down over time— that providing for the needs of one’s family is the only true measure of success. But the world has changed drastically for them. A global economy of higher gas prices and cheap i...

Pulitzer Prize-winner Cynthia Tucker and award-winning author Frye Gaillard reflect on the role of the South in America's long descent into Trumpism. In 1974, Southern author John Egerton published his seminal work, The Americanization of Dixie, reflecting on the double-edged reality of the South becoming more like the rest of the country and vice versa. Tucker and Gaillard dive deeper into that reality from the time that Egerton published his book until the present. They explore ...

Showcases nineteen nationally known writers who have roots in AlabamaIn The Remembered Gate, nationally prominent fiction writers, essayists, and poets recall how their formative years in Alabama shaped them as people and as writers. The essays range in tone from the pained and sorrowful to the wistful and playful, in class from the privileged to the poverty-stricken, in geography from the rural to the urban, and in time from the first years of th...

Jimmy Carter's expansive body of writing ranges across the genres of memoir, commentary, children's literature, poetry, and a novel about the Revolutionary War. Editors Mark I. West and Frye Gaillard have assembled a group of award-winning journalists, poets, historians, and literary scholars to reflect on this substantial – and to some, unexpected – dimension of Carter's legacy. Collectively, these essays, including several by the editors themselves, document a through-line of ethical int...

For years the legendary John Seigenthaler hosted A Word on Words on Nashville's public television station, WNPT. During the show’s four-decade run (1972 to 2013), he interviewed some of the most interesting and most important writers of our time. These in-depth exchanges revealed much about the writers who appeared on his show and gave a glimpse into their creative processes. Seigenthaler was a deeply engaged reader and a generous interviewer, a true craftsman. Frye Gaillard and P...