Reading with Frye Gaillard at the BPL

FRYE GAILLARD brings his keen storyteller’s eye to this pivotal time in American life. He explores the competing story arcs of tragedy and hope through the political and social movements of the times — civil rights, black power, women’s liberation, the War in Vietnam, and the protests against it. But he also examines the cultural manifestations of change — music, literature, art, religion, and science — and so we meet not only the Brothers Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X, but also Gloria Steinem, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, Harper Lee, Mister Rogers, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Andy Warhol, Billy Graham, Thomas Merton, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, Angela Davis, Barry Goldwater, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Berrigan Brothers.

Frye Gaillard is a writer in residence at the University of South Alabama and John Egerton Scholar in Residence at the Southern Foodways Alliance at The University of Mississippi. He is the author of more than 20 books, including Go South to Freedom, Journey to the Wilderness: War, Memory, and a Southern Family’s Civil War Letters, and The Books That Mattered: A Reader’s Memoir. Gaillard is the winner of the Lillian Smith Award, the Clarence Cason Award for Nonfiction, and most recently, the 2016 Eugene Current-Garcia Award for Distinction in Literary Scholarship.