Guinn s examination of the current crop of prominent Southern writers focuses on writers like Larry Brown in Mississippi, Harry Crews in Florida, Dorothy Allison a native of Upstate South Carolina and author of the prize-winning novel Bastard Out of Carolina Barry Hannah in Mississippi, and Kaye Gibbons and Randall Kenan from North Carolina. Southern writing is more democratic than ever before, he said in a telephone conversation from his home in Birmingham last week. You ve always had the poor, blacks and women in Southern fiction, but the people writing about them were white. . . . Now you have a tidal wave of blue-collar experiences described in novels from the South from writers who come from that experience. Those who attend next weekend s S.C. Book Festival, with its theme, Tell Me About the South, will hear from some of the new Southern voices.
Diversity is ascendant.
Southern writers now emerge with Asian backgrounds. White writers find black voices. Black writers adopt whites into their literary structures. Southern writers have discovered that it is no longer necessary to write about rural life to write a Southern fiction. Novelist Josephine Humphreys in Charleston, for example, takes her characters to a decidedly urban stage.