Best of the Fest

LISA ALTHER In her first nonfiction book, Kinfolks: Falling Off the Family Tree, the best-selling author of Kinflicks and other novels searches her own ancestry. Alther, who grew up in Kingsport, Tenn., is split: her mother is from New York, her father from Virginia. So is she herself Southern or Yankee? And what genes, exactly, lurk in her blood roots? Alther’s grandmother parades a tidewater heritage while avoiding her piedmont relatives. Alther is suspicious: could the family be tainted with Melungeon blood? Melungeons—dark-skinned people of mixed ancestry with a reputation for an evil eye and sneaky behavior—live mostly in the backwoods of East Tennessee. Who are they, genetically? Alther tries to sort out the theories. Her research and travels are frustrating and inconclusive until modern DNA techniques supply at least some answers. And the quest demonstrates how genetically diverse the Southeast is and has been since Columbus, if not before. Alther reads Saturday, 4-5 p.m., in the House Chambers. —RALPH BOWDEN

DANIEL ANDERSON Poets often talk about their poems as gifts. The metaphor refers to the care they take in the crafting. You’d be hard-pressed to find a contemporary poet more meticulous in his craft than Daniel Anderson. His first book, January Rain, won the prestigious Roerich Prize, and his second, Drunk in Sunlight, has just been released. It’s no surprise to learn that Anderson edited The Selected Poems of Howard Nemerov. Indeed, it’s impossible not to think of Nemerov when reading Anderson, and not just for the supreme attention he pays to formal elements like meter and rhyme. (Consider these lines: “A world, though not entirely redeemed, / Somewhat less foul, less ruined than it seemed.”) He’s also able, through exquisite phrasing and word choice, to match image to emotion: “By subtle green degrees / They shed that bullion luster of the sun / Until the finches ricochet / Like flints among the drowsing flower heads.” Anderson reads Saturday, 3:30-4:30 p.m., in the Capitol Library. —PABLO TANGUAY

RICK BRAGG Former New York Times journalist and 1996 Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Bragg used the advance from his memoir, All Over But the Shoutin’, to buy his mother a house, the first house she ever owned. Bragg has drawn heavily from his Alabama roots, frequently writing about his family: Shoutin’ is a story of his mother and the way she shielded her three sons from the tornado that was their alcoholic father; Ava’s Mantells the story of her Appalachian childhood. As a Times correspondent stationed in Atlanta, Bragg wrote extensively about Southern poverty and covered events like the Baton Rouge serial killers, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Jonesboro murders and the Elian Gonzalez debacle. In 2004, he wrote I Am a Soldier Too: The Jessica Lynch Story, about the 19-year-old Army soldier captured in Iraq and rescued by U.S. special forces. Bragg will read from a work in progress on Friday, noon-1 p.m., in the War Memorial Auditorium. —CLAIRE SUDDATH

SONNY BREWER Founder of the famed Over the Transom Bookstore in artistically adventurous Fairhope, Ala., Sonny Brewer is both a writer and a promoter of notable writing by others. He’s written two critically acclaimed novels—the first, The Poet of Tolstoy Park, is in film production—and he publishes an annual anthology of deserving Southern authors: Tales from the Blue Moon Café.His most recent book is a novel based on real events: Cormac: The Tale of a Dog Gone Missing is an engaging tale of Brewer’s golden retriever, which disappeared from Fairhope and ultimately turned up at a rescue home in Danbury, Conn. Brewer, who says he “mainly told the truth” in writing this book, traces Cormac’s twisting path and describes his own frantic search to find the dog. But what Brewer’s really writing about are the people he meets along the way, and the story becomes a poignant look at the goodness and sometimes appalling callousness of human nature. Brewer will participate in a panel discussion, “What’s Next for the Short Story?” (with Quinn Dalton, Erika Schickel, Daniel Wallace and Kevin Watson), Friday, 4-5:30 p.m., in the House Chambers. He will also read from Cormac: The Tale of a Dog Gone Missing, Saturday, 2-3 p.m., in Room 30. —WAYNE CHRISTESON

MARK CHILDRESS One Mississippi, by Mark Childress, is set in a high school outside Jackson in the early ’70s, when homosexuality was more hidden and racism more open than they are now. He reveals the overlapping story threads through the eyes of 16-year-old Tim, who has just moved, protesting, from Indiana. A basically good kid, Tim deals with normal problems: hormones, family dysfunction, accidents, bullies, the absurdity of religion and the barely suppressed insanity of practically everybody—all the stuff of good comedy. But he becomes entangled, first through guilt and then passion, with a gorgeous black girl after an accident for which Tim and his one good friend, a boy who is weirder and wilder than he, are partly responsible. Grim undercurrents rise through the hilarity and crest to an ending of prophetic violence. Childress, who also wrote Crazy in Alabama, reads Sunday, 1-2 p.m., in Room 16. —RALPH BOWDEN