Bookmark with Don Noble

Father Gregory Boyle is a Jesuit priest whose work with gang members and former gang members in Los Angeles has become a powerful model of compassion, rehabilitation, and kinship. His memoir Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion gathers stories from decades of ministry among people often written off by society, offering a deeply moving account of grace, humor, grief, and transfor...

Tom Rickman built a long and respected career as a screenwriter, playwright, and director, bringing carefully shaped characters and deeply human stories to both film and television. He is best known for writing the screenplay for Coal Miner's Daughter , the acclaimed 1980 film about the life of country music legend Loretta Lynn, and for the made-for-television adaptation of Tuesdays with Morrie ....

Tito Perdue is a Southern novelist known for fierce satire, idiosyncratic prose, and a deep suspicion of modern life. Several of his novels feature Leland "Lee" Pefley, Perdue's cantankerous alter ego — a learned, combative, and often comic figure who looks upon the late 20th century with very little affection. In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble , Don Noble speaks with Tito Perdue at the J...

Stewart O'Nan is a successful and prolific writer of fiction whose novels often find drama, tenderness, and consequence in the lives of ordinary people. Before turning fully to writing, O'Nan studied aerospace engineering at Boston University and worked as a test engineer for Grumman Aerospace, later earning an MFA in fiction from Cornell University. In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble , Do...

Roger Rosenblatt has spent decades writing with clarity, wit, and moral urgency about American life, politics, family, war, aging, grief, patriotism, and the human condition. Familiar to many public television viewers as a frequent essayist for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer , Rosenblatt has also written for Time , The Washington Post , The New Republic , and other major publications. In this episod...

Roger Reid has spent years helping Alabama audiences better understand the natural world as a writer, director, and producer for the award-winning public television series Discovering Alabama . In his young-adult novels Longleaf and Space , Reid brings that same love of science, nature, and discovery to fiction, combining adventure storytelling with factual information about Alabama's forests, wil...

Richard Tillinghast is a poet, essayist, teacher, and travel writer whose work reflects a life shaped by Southern roots, literary mentorship, and a deep engagement with place, history, and culture. Raised in Memphis, Tennessee, Tillinghast studied at the University of the South in Sewanee before earning graduate degrees at Harvard, where he studied with the poet Robert Lowell. In this episode of B...

Pat Devoto's novels belong to a rich tradition of Southern coming-of-age stories, a line that runs from Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer to Harper Lee's Scout Finch. In  My Last Days as Roy Rogers and Out of the Night That Covers Me , Devoto writes about childhood, memory, race, family, and the complicated history of the South with humor, tenderness, and moral seriousness. In this episode of Bookmark with...

Neil White's memoir In the Sanctuary of Outcasts tells the remarkable true story of the year he spent in a federal prison that also shared its grounds with the last leprosarium in the continental United States. At first, the premise sounds almost impossible: a prison sentence served in Carville, Louisiana, among inmates, guards, medical staff, nuns, and patients who had lived for years with Hansen...

Michael Cunningham's acclaimed novel The Hours received both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Inspired in part by Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway , the novel moves across time and consciousness, beginning with Woolf's final days in 1941 and expanding into the lives of modern women struggling with love, identity, obligation, and mortality. In this episode of Bookmark w...

Melinda Rainey Thompson has built a devoted readership with humorous essays about suburban family life, motherhood, marriage, manners, and the rituals of Southern womanhood. Her books SWAG: Southern Women Aging Gracefully and The SWAG Life turned everyday domestic experiences into sharp, affectionate comedy. In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble , Don Noble speaks with Melinda Rainey Thompson...

Madison Jones, one of Alabama's most distinguished fiction writers, was originally from Tennessee but spent much of his career in Alabama. A novelist deeply rooted in the Southern literary tradition, Jones wrote fiction marked by moral seriousness, historical weight, and a powerful sense of place. In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble , Don Noble speaks with Madison Jones following a remarkab...

Kinky Friedman was a novelist, songwriter, satirist, humorist, and one-of-a-kind Texas personality whose work earned him both a wide readership and a devoted cult following. Known for his irreverent wit and unmistakable voice, Friedman built a career that crossed boundaries between literature, music, politics, and comedy. In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble, Don Noble sits down with Kinky F...

Kerry Madden is an accomplished writer of fiction and nonfiction for young readers, with a gift for capturing family, place, and the emotional lives of young people. Her Maggie Valley Trilogy — Gentle's Holler, Louisiana's Song, and Jessie's Mountain — is set in the mountains of North Carolina and follows a family whose stories are rooted in music, hardship, imagination, and Appalachian life. In t...

Keith Thomson brings wit, speed, and an inventive twist to the spy thriller. In his novels Once a Spy and Twice a Spy, Thomson introduces Drummond Clark, a 64-year-old retired appliance salesman who appears to be suffering from Alzheimer's disease. To the amazement of his son, Charlie — and to the reader — Drummond's ordinary life turns out to be a cover. He was once a legendary CIA operative, and...

Kathryn Magendie's fiction is known for its lyrical, intimate voice and its deep attention to family, memory, place, and the difficult work of finding one's way home. In Tender Graces, the first novel in her Graces series, Magendie follows Virginia Kate Carey as she returns to her Appalachian roots and confronts the painful history of a fractured family. In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble,...

John S. Sledge has spent much of his career studying, preserving, and interpreting the history of Mobile, Alabama. As book review editor for the Mobile Press-Register and architectural historian for the Mobile Historic Development Commission, Sledge has brought together a critic's eye, a historian's discipline, and a deep affection for the Gulf Coast. In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble, Do...

In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble, Don Noble speaks with Jennifer Paddock at the Friends Bookstore in the Fairhope Public Library during the annual gathering Southern Writers Reading. Their conversation explores Paddock's early novels, her interest in women at turning points in their lives, and the pull of places such as Point Clear, Fairhope, Destin, and the Gulf Coast. Paddock is the au...

Jeffrey Stepakoff spent more than a decade in Hollywood as a television writer, working on series including Dawson's Creek, The Wonder Years, and Sisters. Those years in writers' rooms, pitch meetings, and network television helped shape his memoir Billion-Dollar Kiss: The Kiss That Saved Dawson's Creek and Other Adventures in TV Writing, a behind-the-scenes look at life as a screenwriter during a...

In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble, Don Noble speaks with Janisse Ray in Carmichael Library on the campus of the University of Montevallo. Their conversation explores Ray's life and work, her deep connection to the rural South, and the ways personal history, ecology, and activism come together in her writing. Ray's acclaimed memoir Ecology of a Cracker Childhood helped establish her as a m...

In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble, author Inman Majors discusses his third novel, The Millionaires, a fictionalized account of the brothers who helped bring the World's Fair to Knoxville, Tennessee. Blending history, humor, and sharp social observation, Majors explores ambition, family, money, and the subtle distinctions of class in the New South. The novel offers a smart and serious look...

In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble, Alabama author Gin Phillips joins Don Noble in the studio at Reese Phifer Hall on the campus of the University of Alabama to discuss her novel Come In and Cover Me. Phillips first gained national attention with her debut novel, The Well and the Mine, set in Carbon Hill, Alabama in 1931, which won the 2009 Barnes & Noble Discover Award. Rather than return...

In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble, Don Noble talks with distinguished American poet Galway Kinnell, whose long career made him one of the most admired poetic voices of his generation. Kinnell, whose Selected Poems won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, was also a MacArthur Fellow, a former Vermont State Poet, and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Known for p...

In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble, novelist David Guterson joins Don Noble at Writing Today, Birmingham-Southern College's annual conference for readers and writers, for a conversation about fiction, place, and the Pacific Northwest landscapes that shape his work. Best known for his bestselling novel Snow Falling on Cedars, winner of the 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Guterson has b...

In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble, poet and writer Beth Ann Fennelly talks with Don Noble at the J.D. Williams Library at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. A native of the Chicago suburbs who has become as rooted as kudzu in the American South, Fennelly brings humor, insight, and lyric intelligence to a conversation about poetry, place, family, and the writer's life. Fennelly, who...