Audio Podcast: Lee Smith and Hal Crowther

Novelist and short story writer Lee Smith, and her husband, the essayist and journalist Hal Crowther, came to town to give a reading yesterday, and I had the opportunity to interview them both. Smith is author of more than a dozen works of fiction, including the recent novel On Agate Hill; she has won numerous awards for her work, including the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, a Lila Wallace / Reader's Digest Award, and the Robert Penn Warren Prize for Fiction. Hal Crowther has written three books of nonfiction, and his work has appeared in a great number of newspapers, magazines, and journals, including the Oxford American, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Time, and Newsweek. His most recent book is Gather At The River: Notes From The Post-Millennial South. We talked about why people always seem to want to know what it means to be a Southern writer, what is up with the Republicans' Southern strategy, and whether having a writer for a spouse is a blessing or a curse. Check it out at the Writers At Cornell Blog.