Board of Directors

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.






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)






(photo by Dennis Holt)
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 ©)

Buford’s latest creative work is The House Across the Road, and Other Stories
(Photo by Yolanda Jackson)