Board of Directors

Zanice Bond, Auburn
Zanice Bond, AuburnPresident
Zanice Bond has made Alabama home for over a decade and is passionate about the arts and the humanities both in and out of the classroom. She is on the board of the Alabama Writers’ Forum and serves as its Vice President. Dr. Bond earned her Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Kansas and is currently an associate

professor of English in the Department of Modern Languages, Communication, and Philosophy at Tuskegee University (TU), where she teaches first-year English composition, African American literature, Southern literature, and Modern English Grammar and Linguistics. She serves on the planning committee for TU’s Annual Ellison Lecture and is Co-Principal Investigator for the University’s “Lift as We Climb: The Freshman Common Reading Experience with Transformative Texts” funded by an NEH-Teagle Foundation grant. She was the recipient of a Booker T. Washington Leadership Institute mini-grant for 2021-2022 and was co-director of a two-year NEH grant “Literary Legacies of Macon County and Tuskegee Institute: Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph W. Ellison, and Albert Murray”. Zanice was also guest curator at TU’s Legacy Museum for the “Soul of Zora: A Literary Legacy through Quilts” exhibit that ran from March until September 2019.

She has served as lead scholar for two Alabama Humanities Alliance SUPER Teacher Institutes: “Examining Dyann Robinson’s The Three Wives of Booker T.” and “All Y’all Really From Alabama: Teaching the Poetry of Ashley M. Jones”. In 2017, she received a Fulbright-Hays award to Santiago, Chile, and a Poetry Foundation Fellowship for the Furious Flower Center’s Legacy Seminar on Yusef Komunyakaa at James Madison University.

Zanice is serving a three-year term on the Encyclopedia of Alabama Advisory Council and is a member of the Southern Literary Trail Project/Exhibits committee. She has served on the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame committee (2022 Class) and is on the Harper Lee Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer committee (2022). Zanice is an Alabama Folklife Association Cauthen Fellow (2022-2023) and makes her home in Auburn, Alabama.

Jocelyn Cullity, Mobile
Jocelyn Cullity, Mobile
I was born in Australia, grew up in Toronto, and now I live in Mobile, Alabama. I am the Director of Creative Writing and the Stokes Center at the University of South Alabama. Living in different places in the world has definitely informed who I am and what I am driven to write about. But I think all of my creative work looks at the absence of women at key historic moments.

When I worked in film and television, I went to China and made a documentary film, Going to the Sea (Women’s Television Network; winner, Lester B. Pearson Award, Canada), about women teachers who were eclipsed by what was then a new market economy.

My first novel, Amah & the Silk-Winged Pigeons, is the result of ten years of research into the lives of Indian and African women who lived in Lucknow, India during 1857. The book is a counterhistory about the women who actually financed and led the “mutiny,” what became a crucial and significant fight against English dominance. The novel has been translated into French and Tamil and won the 2018 Best Book Awards in Historical Fiction.

My second novel, The Envy of Paradise, is also a counter history about Begum Hazrat Mahal, the woman who led the resistance to the English in India. The book was a finalist in Multicultural Fiction for the 2020 International Book Awards.

The setting of The Nurse at Baker Hospital, my third historical novel, takes me much closer to my home in the United States. Told through Della, a poor nurse struggling to get through the Depression on her own, the novel is based on the true story about Norman Baker, a demagogue and radio propagandist who set up a nationally renowned cancer clinic in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.

My short stories, essays, and interviews have been published in the United States, Canada, India, and England in journals such as The Missouri Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, Blackbird, The Kipling Journal, African American Review, and the anthology, Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet.

Donna Estill, Decatur
Donna Estill, DecaturSecretary
Dr. Donna Estill is currently Dean of Humanities & Social Sciences at Calhoun Community College. She holds a BA in Journalism with a minor in French from the University of Alabama, an MA in English from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and an EdD from the University of Alabama. After working as a budget analyst

at the University of Alabama in Huntsville while earning a Master’s degree in English, she taught English at South Arkansas Community College. While working on her doctorate, she worked as an administrator and middle school/high school English, history and PE teacher at the Capitol School in Tuscaloosa and was managing editor for Crystal Growth and Design, an American Chemical Society journal. She then taught English at Alabama Southern Community College (now Coastal Alabama Community College) in Monroeville, also serving as Assistant Director of the Alabama Center for Literary Arts and Humanities Division Chair. She moved to Fort Scott, Kansas, to serve as Dean of Instruction/Chief Academic Officer at Fort Scott Community College before returning to Calhoun Community College. In addition to being an administrator, she teaches as often as possible, has served as the Humanities Advisor for the Alabama Writers’ Symposium, and is an active member of the Alabama Association for Developmental Education. She was chosen as Outstanding Administrator at Calhoun for the 2017-18 academic year and was awarded with a NISOD Excellence Medal.
Suzanne La Rosa
Suzanne La RosaMember Representative
Suzanne La Rosa is a founder and publisher of NewSouth Books, an independent publisher in Montgomery, Alabama. New South publishes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and children’s books. In 2022, NewSouth was acquired as an imprint of the University of Georgia Press. Books from NewSouth have been recognized by critics for outstanding writing and strong cultural content. The house’s fiction and

nonfiction titles have won awards, been translated and adapted for stage and film, and adopted in colleges and high schools. Over the years, NewSouth published more than eight hundred titles in such categories as southern history, politics, African American studies, biography/memoir, civil rights, education, essays, fiction, folklore, children’s pictorial/young adult, and poetry. As an imprint of the University of Georgia Press, NewSouth will continue to publish ten to fifteen new titles per year, and its four-hundred-title backlist will continue to be distributed and sold internationally.
Tina Mozelle Braziel, Birmingham
Tina Mozelle Braziel, BirminghamMember Representative
Tina Mozelle Braziel won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry for Known by Salt (Anhinga Press). She co-authored Glass Cabin (Pulley Press) with her husband, writer James Braziel. An Alabama Poetry Delegate, she has been awarded a fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, an artist residency at Hot Springs National Park,

and the first Eco-Poetry Fellowship from the Magic City Poetry Festival. She directs the Ada Long Creative Writing Workshop for high school students at UAB.

Jay Lamar, Auburn
Jay Lamar, AuburnTreasurer
Jay Lamar served as the executive director of the Alabama Bicentennial Commission from 2014 through 2020. Before that she was the director of Special Programs for Auburn University Libraries and for the AU Associate Provost for Undergraduate Studies and managing editor of Auburn Speaks, an annual publication of

the Vice President for Research. Before moving to Special Programs, she was director of the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts & Humanities, the outreach office of the AU College of Liberal Arts. A native of Alabama, Lamar was co-editor with Jeanie Thompson of The Remembered Gate: Memoirs by Alabama Writers.

Julie Friedman, Fairhope
Julie Friedman, Fairhope
Julie Friedman graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Alabama with a BA in Art History. She served on the Boards of the National Museum for Women in the Arts (Alabama Committee), the Alabama Writers’ Forum, the Mobile Arts Council, the Mobile Opera, Mobile Ballet, the Mobile Museum of Art, and the History Museum of Mobile.

She is currently serving on the University of Alabama’s Paul Jones Collection Advisory Board and the University of Alabama’s Library Leadership Board.

She is serving her third term on the Alabama State Council on the Arts and is the former Chair of the Council. Friedman also served as chair of the Council’s Grants Committee and as chair of the Council’s Long-Range Planning Committee.

Friedman’s other civic activities include the Community Foundation of Southwest Alabama (Building Families Committee), the Steering Committee and Implementation Committee for the Cultural Plan (City of Mobile), Fairhope Chamber of Commerce, Junior League of Mobile, Mobile Opera Guild and Leadership Mobile. She also is a member of Mobile United and participated in the Leadership Initiative of Leadership Alabama.

Friedman and her husband, Dr. Frank Friedman, own and operate the Point of View Bed and Breakfast Inn.

(photo by Barbara Reed)

Jacqueline Allen Trimble, Montgomery
Jacqueline Allen Trimble, Montgomery
Jacqueline Allen Trimble is a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow (Poetry), a Cave Canem Fellow, and a two-time Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellow. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Louisville Review, The Offing, and Poet Lore and has been featured by Poem of the Day, Poem-a Day, and Poetry Daily.

Published by NewSouth Books, American Happiness, her debut collection, won the 2016 Balcones Poetry Prize. Her new collection, How to Survive the Apocalypse, was named one of the ten best poetry books of 2022 by the New York Public Library, and she recently contributed the essay “I Have Seen the Promised Land and It Is Me” to Old Enough: Southern Women Artists and Writers on Creativity and Aging. Trimble is Professor of English and chairs the Department of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University.
Sandra Whatley-Washington, Montgomery
Sandra Whatley-Washington, Montgomery
Sandra Whatley Washington, a native of Montgomery, Alabama, graduated from Alabama State University and Auburn University. She was a cooperating teacher for the “Writing Our Stories” Program for 10 years at the Wallace School on the Mt. Meigs Campus. She retired from Alabama Department of Youth Services after

nearly forty years of service for the state of Alabama. She is married to Michael Washington and the mother to Erin, Erica and Christopher.
Lauren Slaughter
Lauren Slaughter
Lauren Slaughter is a former NEA fellow in poetry, the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and author of the poetry collections, Spectacle (2022) and a lesson in smallness (2015). Her poems, essays, and short stories appear in Image, Harvard Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Pleiades, and 32 Poems, among many other places.

She is a Professor of English at The University of Alabama at Birmingham where she is also Editor-in-Chief of NELLE, a literary journal that publishes writing focused on women and their experiences. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her husband and three children. Find her online at www.laurenslaughter.com.
Kimberly Casey, Huntsville
Kimberly Casey, Huntsville
Kimberly Casey is Founder and Director of Out Loud HSV, a nonprofit literary arts organization. She also works as Poetry Editor for Passengers Press and is currently on the Board. Her publications have appeared in various publications, including Where the Water Begins (Riot in Your Throat Press, 2021), COMP Interdisciplinary Journal (2024), Out Loud HSV: A Year In Review (2015-2024), Poetry Magazine (2021),

SWIMM, Southern Women’s Review, Lost Balloon, and more. Kimberly holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University and a BFA in Writing Literature and Publishing from Emerson College.
Tom Perrin
Tom Perrin
Tom Perrin is Chair of the Department of Language, Literature, and Communication; Director of the Hobbs Honors Program and Academic Outreach; and Professor of English at Huntingdon College. He chairs Huntingdon’s Race and Justice Initiative. Books include The Crooked Man (2024) and The Aesthetics of Middlebrow Fiction: Popular US Novels, Modernism and Form, 1945-75.

He has published in numerous scholarly collections, journals, and book chapters as well as short stories, blogs, and op-ed pieces. Tom holds a PhD and MA in English Literature from The University of Chicago, MA and BA in English Literature from Cambridge University, and PGDip in Theatre Directing from Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts (London).
Sue Brannan Walker
Sue Brannan WalkerEmeritus Member
Sue Brannan Walker is a returning board member, having served on the founding executive committee of the Forum from 1992 -1995. Walker was commissioned as Alabama’s Poet Laureate in 2004 by Gov. Bob Riley. She holds an M.A., M.Ed., and Ph.D. from Tulane University. She is known nationally and internationally for her poetry

and critical articles on poets and writers such as James Dickey, Marge Piercy, Flannery O’Connor, and Carson McCullers. As publisher of Negative Capability Press and of the journal Negative Capability, she has published not only such authors as Jimmy Carter, E.O. Wilson, John Updike, William Stafford, Gerald Stern, Jack Coulehan, David Ignatow, Mary Oliver, Pat Schneider, Karl Shapiro, Richard Eberhart, Diane Wakoski, Roald Hoffman, Bernie Seigel, and Rita Dove, but also numerous Alabama poets and writers, providing them a greater audience and some of them their first opportunity to be published. Walker’s poetry, prose, and community service have garnered numerous awards, grants, and fellowships. She has published six volumes of poetry. Walker serves as the chair of the University of South Alabama English Department and director of the Stokes Center for Creative Writing at USA.

(photo by Dennis Holt)

Jeanie Thompson, Montgomery
Jeanie Thompson, MontgomeryEx Officio (Founding Executive Director)
Jeanie Thompson, founding executive director emerita of the Forum, is a published poet, essayist, an editor, and arts education advocate. She has published five collections of poetry — The Myth of Water: Poems from the Life of Helen Keller, The Seasons Bear Us, White for Harvest: New and Selected Poems, Witness, and How to Enter the River.

She co-edited The Remembered Gate: Memoirs by Alabama Writers, with Jay Lamar. Her poems, interviews with writers, and critical articles have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies.
Jeanie holds the MFA from The University of Alabama, where she was founding editor of the literary journal Black Warrior Review. She has taught at the University of New Orleans, the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, and the poetry-in-the-schools program in New Orleans and in Alabama. Jeanie has received Individual Artist fellowships from the Louisiana State Arts Council and the Alabama State Council on the Arts. She teaches as an adjunct poetry faculty member in the Naslund-Mann School of Writing at Spalding University, a low-residency MFA Writing Program. In 2024, Jeanie was awarded the Albert B. Head Legacy Award from the Alabama State Council on the Arts for her work in Alabama literary arts.
(photo by Jerry Siegel ©)
Jim Buford, Auburn
Jim Buford, AuburnEmeritus Member
Jim Buford is a management consultant whose published creative work includes essays, short stories, and social history. He is the former Southern Literature columnist for The Montgomery Advertiser.

Buford’s latest creative work is The House Across the Road, and Other Stories

(2010, Mindbridge Press)

(Photo by Yolanda Jackson)