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.
Work Lunch
Work Lunch By Lee Bains Hub City Press; 2026 Paperback: $18.00 Genre: Poetry Reviewed by Edward Journey Lee Bains’s expansive poetry has been compared to Whitman and Sandburg. Those comparisons ring true in the range of Bains’s language and skill at pulling a multitude of rivulets and impressions together to make a complex world more precise and inspiring. By the time I got to “Salad,” the final poem in Work Lunch, Bains’s authentic and essential poetry collection, I couldn’t escape a comparison to another American poet, Allan Ginsberg, and the feeling that Bains, in an epic of the Southern working class, has written his own “Howl.” His poetry is mesmeric like that. Lee Bains is best-known as the frontman for the edgy rock band Lee Bains and the Glory Fires (he was in the Dexateens before that). There’s a Bomb in Gilead, his first album with the Glory Fires, first attracted my attention for the title alone. The album itself was well worth the listen. Moving forward, the band’s hard-driving sound and Bains’s provocative lyrics continue through [...]
