The Alabama Writers’ Forum
The Alabama Writers’ Forum, a partnership program of the Alabama State Council on the Arts, works to cultivate our state’s literary culture. We do that through supporting writers at all stages. We encourage our young writers to find their creative voice through the Father Goose Poetry Festival for Kids!–and through our Alabama High School Literary Arts Awards. We support the work of our state’s literary community through our Alabama Authors Directory, First Draft magazine, and other programming and opportunities for writers across the state. And we celebrate our state’s rich literary legacy through the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame. We are, above all, a community of writers united by our desire to advance the literary arts in Alabama. If that describes you — join us! There are many ways to get involved.
Southern Bred
Southern Bred By Charles Ghigna Central Avenue Poetry, 2025 Cloth: $19.00 Genre: Poetry Reviewed by Foster Dickson For those who are accustomed to associating Charles Ghighna’s name with Father Goose . . . this isn’t that. Ghigna is an accomplished poet whose publications range from The Father Goose Treasury of Poems for Children to inclusion in Harper’s and The New Yorker. His newest collection, Southern Bred, is a slim volume of mostly short poems – definitely for adults – that haunt the imagination with what is left unspoken. The text on the back cover describes them as “gothic poems” steeped in the Deep South, and the pages bear that out. The first section opens with the title poem: “Southern Bred,” a brief, imagistic verse about killing a chicken on a stump, which ends with the speaker’s ominous shadow on the bird’s neck. What follows is “1952,” and we get a bit of grounding in real time for the voice and its stories. The speaker was six years old then, and soon we meet “Jimmy’s Dad,” a gas station attendant in gray overalls, who is dead in the poem that follows it. A few pages later, the speaker’s [...]
