Virtual Alumni Book Clubs are back – this season with a theme on Birmingham-Southern authors.

Following several successful book clubs hosted since summer 2020, the Office of Alumni Engagement is offering more clubs for spring 2021. Each club will read and discuss a book written by a BSC graduate or connection, and each of our featured authors will take part in the discussions, with the exception of the late Howard Cruse ’68.

The program is free and open to alumni as well as faculty and staff, students, parents, and the Birmingham community. All you need to do is choose a book (purchase, borrow, or check out from your local library), agree to ground rules for the discussion, and commit to finishing the book before the virtual meeting. To allow for discussion, book clubs will be limited to 12 participants each.

Here’s how you can participate:

• Sign up online from Feb. 1-10 through the Eventbrite links below.
• Reading period ends March 10.
• Book Clubs will meet from March 11-23.

6:30 p.m. Thursday, March 11
“Fierce Kingdom” by Gin Phillips ’97
Facilitator: Dr. Fred Ashe, Retired Professor of English
Tags: motherhood, thrill-ride, tender
Eventbrite Sign-Up Here

The zoo is nearly empty as Joan and her four-year-old son soak up the last few moments of playtime. They are happy, and the day has been close to perfect. But what Joan sees as she hustles her son toward the exit gate minutes before closing time sends her sprinting back into the zoo, her child in her arms. And for the next three hours – the entire scope of the novel – she keeps on running. Joan’s intimate knowledge of her son and of the zoo itself—the hidden pathways and under-renovation exhibits, the best spots on the carousel and overstocked snack machines – is all that keeps them a step ahead of danger.

Gin Phillips ’97 is the award-winning author of six novels, ranging from historical fiction to literary thriller to middle grade. Phillips’ debut novel, “The Well and the Mine,” won the 2009 Barnes & Noble Discover Award. Her most recent novel, “Fierce Kingdom,” was named one of the best books of 2017 by Publishers Weekly, NPR, Amazon, and Kirkus Reviews. Born in Montgomery, Phillips studied political journalism at BSC and currently lives with her family in Birmingham. You can read more about her work at ginphillips.com.

Dr. Fred Ashe joined the Department of English at BSC in 1991 and taught until his retirement in 2020. Ashe’s teaching and research highlights include African American literature, contemporary American fiction, postmodern theory, American Inequality, and Hemingway. He earned his bachelor’s degree in economics (of all things) at Michigan State University, and, after five weeks in law school, he switched gears and received his Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University. In 2009, Ashe married one of the great American novelists working today – Gin Phillips.

6:30 p.m. Monday, March 15
“Ahab’s Wife: Or, The Star-Gazer” by Sena Jeter Naslund ’63
Facilitators: Judy Shaw Cook ’68 and Jim Cook ’68
Tags: epic, adventure, lyrical
Eventbrite Sign-Up Here

A magnificent, vast, and enthralling saga, Naslund’s “Ahab’s Wife” is a remarkable epic spanning a rich, eventful, and dramatic life. Inspired by a brief passage in “Moby Dick,” it is the story of Una, exiled as a child to live in a lighthouse, removed from the physical and emotional abuse of a religion-mad father. It is the romantic adventure of a young woman setting sail in a cabin boy’s disguise to encounter darkness, wonder, and catastrophe; the story of a devoted wife who witnesses her husband’s destruction by obsession and madness. Ultimately it is the powerful and moving story of a woman’s triumph over tragedy and loss through her courage, creativity, and intelligence.

Sena Jeter Naslund ’63 is a creative writing professor and author of nine works of fiction. Naslund grew up in Norwood, graduated from BSC, and then earned her Ph.D. in modern letters from the Iowa Writers Workshop. She went on to become a distinguished and beloved professor at many universities, including the University of Montana, University of Indiana, and the University of Louisville, as well as Montevallo University and the University of Alabama Huntsville, where she has held endowed teaching chairs. Naslund also founded the brief-residency MFA in Writing at Spalding University and was named BSC’s Distinguished Alumna in 2004. Her critically acclaimed fiction includes novels “Ahab’s Wife” (1999) and “Four Spirits” (2003), both of which were named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. See Naslund’s other works here.

Judy Shaw Cook ’68 grew up in Jasper, Alabama, and graduated from Walker County High School. On her first day at Birmingham-Southern, she met Jim Cook, and on their last day at BSC in 1968, they were married. Cook taught in public and private schools until 2006 when she retired and became a docent volunteer at the Birmingham Museum of Art. The cooks have travelled extensively and hope to do so again. They have a beautiful family: KC, Mark, Tori, Christie, and two cute but lazy cats.

Jim Cook ’68 graduated from Wilcox County High School before coming to BSC, where Judy Shaw was his introduction to student life. They spent six years in Austin, Texas, after their wedding, then returned to Alabama. Cook taught in the music department at BSC from 1974 to 2012, in spite of retiring in 2009. Since then, they’ve traveled a lot, Cook still makes music from organ benches here and abroad, and they both enjoy reading – to which Cook says, “I guess those classes with Richebourg McWilliams did teach us something!”

6:30 p.m. Monday, March 15
“Pearls of Wisdom: Little Pieces of Advice (That Go a Long Way)” by Barbara Bush
Composed of the former First Lady’s own writings and stories from family, staff, and close friends, including the last chapter written by Rev. Dr. Russell Levenson, Jr. ’84
Facilitator: Laura Sisson ’79
Tags: memoir, life lessons, witty, compassionate
Eventbrite Sign-Up Here

First Lady Barbara Bush was famous for handing out advice. From friends and family to heads of state and Supreme Court justices, and certainly to her staff, her advice ranged from what to wear, what to say or not say, and how to live your life. When she turned 80, she owned up to all her advice-giving and explained it this way: “After all, in 80 years of living, I have survived six children, 17 grandchildren, six wars, a book by Kitty Kelly, two presidents, two governors, big Election Day wins and big Election Day losses, and 61 years of marriage to a husband who keeps jumping out of perfectly good airplanes. So, it’s just possible that along the way I’ve learned a thing or two.” At the end of the day, she taught all of us some valuable lessons.

Rev. Dr. Russell Levenson ’84 serves as the rector at St. Martin’s in Houston, the largest Episcopal Church in the United States. As rector, Levenson co-officiated and offered a homily at the state funeral for President George H. W. Bush in Washington, D.C., and in Houston, and also officiated and preached at the funeral for First Lady Barbara Bush in Houston. President and Mrs. Bush were active members of St. Martin’s for more than 50 years. Before arriving at St. Martin’s in 2007, Levenson served parishes in Alabama, Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Florida. He has since published four devotional books. Levenson returned to the Hilltop in 2017 to deliver a homily at the 50^th anniversary celebration of the rededication of Yeilding Chapel, where he met his wife, Laura Norton Levenson, as a BSC student. He was also named one of BSC’s Distinguished Alumni in 2019.

Laura Sisson ’79 is a Christian educator and the former director of church relations at BSC. In her 23 years working at the College, Sisson traveled to and spoke in churches, sponsored youth and children’s events on campus, helped recruiting efforts through the church and Camp Sumatanga, and directed the church relations scholarship program. She also developed the Covenant pre-ministry program for discernment and spiritual growth for students with a call to ministry. Sisson is active in summer camps at Sumatanga and with programs at McCoy Adult Day Care, which sits across from the Hilltop.

6:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 16
“Alabama Moon” by Watt Key ’92
Facilitator: Brooke Tanner Battle ’96
Tags: action-packed, coming of age, young readers
Eventbrite Sign-Up Here

For as long as ten-year-old Moon can remember, he has lived out in the forest in a shelter with his father. They keep to themselves, their only contact with other human beings an occasional trip to the nearest general store. When Moon’s father dies, Moon follows his father’s last instructions: to travel to Alaska to find others like themselves. But Moon is soon caught and entangled in a world he doesn’t know or understand, apparent property of the government he has been avoiding all his life. As the spirited and resourceful Moon encounters constables, jails, institutions, lawyers, true friends, and true enemies, he adapts his wilderness survival skills and learns to survive in the outside world, and even, perhaps, make his home there.

Watt Key ’92 is an award-winning southern fiction author. Key spent much of his childhood hunting and fishing in southern Alabama forests, which inspired his 2006 debut novel, “Alabama Moon.” The book won the 2007 E.B. White Read-Aloud Award and has been translated in seven languages. Following “Alabama Moon,” Key has since published eight more novels that are often incorporated in school curriculum for young readers – though his work can be enjoyed by all ages. He currently lives in south Alabama with his wife and three children. See Key’s other work at wattkey.com.

Brooke Tanner Battle ’96 is the founder and CEO of Swell Fundraising as well as a member of the BSC Board of Trustees. Under Battle’s leadership, Swell Fundraising has supported hundreds of nonprofits across the country since its launch in 2012. She has served the local nonprofit community for 20 years through leadership roles with the Women’s Fund of Greater Birmingham, the Alabama School of Fine Arts Foundation, Oasis Counseling Center, GirlSpring, and Railroad Park. Battle, like Key, grew up in south Alabama and remains close with his family.

6:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 17
“My Soul is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South” by Howell Raines ’64
Facilitator: Dr. Mark Schantz, Professor of History
Tags: Civil Rights Movement, narrative biography, tribute
Eventbrite Sign-Up Here

The almost unfathomable courage and the undying faith that propelled the Civil Rights Movement are brilliantly captured in the moving personal recollections of “My Soul is Rested.” Here are the voices of leaders and followers, of ordinary people who became extraordinary in the face of turmoil and violence. From the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1956 to the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, these are the people who fought the epic battle: Rosa Parks, Andrew Young, Ralph Abernathy, Hosea Williams, Fannie Lou Hamer, and others, both black and white, who participated in sit-ins, Freedom Rides, voter drives, and campaigns for school and university integration. Here, too, are voices from the “Down-Home Resistance” that supported George Wallace, Bull Connor, and the “traditions” of the Old South – voices that conjure up the frightening terrain on which the battle was fought.

Howell Raines ’64 is an award-winning journalist with a concentration on the Civil Rights Movement, a focus he developed as a BSC student and a young Birmingham reporter. Raines worked for The New York Times in Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and London. In 1993, he became the newspaper’s editorial page editor before becoming the executive editor in New York from 2001 to 2003. Raines won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for “Grady’s Gift,” a story published in The New York Times Magazine about his family’s Black housekeeper as well as his own childhood in Alabama. He also wrote and published “The Birmingham Bombing” in 1983 – the most complete record of the 1963 Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing investigation and the first time the bombers’ names were in print. He has published four books along with his reportage.

Dr. Mark Schantz serves as chair of the BSC Department of History and is a historian of 19^th century U.S. social, cultural, and labor history. Schantz has also developed interests in African American history and Africana Studies, film and history, the history of American medicine, and American music history (particularly Bob Dylan.) Before joining BSC as the Provost in 2009, he taught at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, for 18 years. Schantz has been teaching courses in history, leadership studies, and interdisciplinary studies after he stepped down as Provost in 2014 to have more time in the classroom.

6:30 p.m. Thursday, March 18
“An Anguished Hallelujah” by Linda Flaherty-Goldsmith, President Emeritus
Facilitator: Dr. Louanne Jacobs, Associate Professor of Education
Tags: memoir, American South, family
Eventbrite Sign-Up Here

For many white Southerners, growing up in rural Mississippi during the 1950s and early ’60s, life was anything but moonlight and magnolias. In this collection of nonfiction short stories and vignettes, Flaherty-Goldsmith reminisces about life among the poor whites of the American South, a population often overlooked in literature in favor of coarse redneck caricatures or affluent whites and their African-American servants. The Flaherty children had a hardscrabble upbringing, as their mother struggled to support the six of her nine children who remained at home after her husband’s abandonment. The reality depicted is a stark one in which race, economics, and religion figure prominently. And yet, at the core is a heartening message about sheer determination and the strength of family.

Linda Flaherty-Goldsmith served as BSC’s fifteenth president from 2016 until her retirement in 2018, making her the College’s first female president. Flaherty-Goldsmith first came to BSC as a consultant to the Board and later transitioned into the role of Chief of Staff, bringing years of senior leadership experience in higher education. Before coming to BSC, Flaherty-Goldsmith served as Vice President for Finance and Administration for UAB, Vice Chancellor for Financial Affairs for the University of Alabama System, and Vice President and Chief Operating Officer for the University of Connecticut. Since 2013, Flaherty-Goldsmith has worked as a pro bono consultant with Human Rights First, a non-profit, nonpartisan human rights organization based in Washington, D.C., and New York, to create, implement, and advance an international campaign designed to disrupt the business of human trafficking.

Louanne Jacobs has over two decades of experience in K-12 public education. Jacobs is a native Alabamian, having grown up in Clay, Alabama, and she has taught K-12, served as a school and regional reading specialist, and served as director of the Alabama A&M Regional Inservice Center. She is completing her 12th year at BSC and has research interests in children’s and adolescent literacy, literacy and social justice, and constructivist pedagogy. Most importantly, Jacobs is expecting a granddaughter in July.

6:30 p.m. Monday, March 22
“Stuck Rubber Baby” (25th Anniversary Edition) by Howard Cruse ’68
Facilitator: GK Armstrong ’92, Assistant Professor of the Library
Tags: LGBTQ+ lit, American South, comics/illustration
Eventbrite Sign-Up Here

In the 1960s American South, a young gas-station attendant named Toland Polk is rejected from the Army draft for admitting “homosexual tendencies,” and falls in with a close-knit group of young locals yearning to break from the conformity of their hometown through civil rights activism, folk music and upstart communality of race-mixing, gay-friendly nightclubs. Toland’s story is both deeply personal and epic in scope, as his search for identity plays out against the brutal fight over segregation, an unplanned pregnancy and small-town bigotry, aided by an unforgettable supporting cast.

Howard Cruse ’68 was a groundbreaking artist, writer, and leader in the LGBTQ community. Cruse wrote and illustrated the 1980s comic strip “Wendel” in LGBTQ magazine The Advocate, served as the founding editor of underground series Gay Comix, and published “Stuck Rubber Baby,” a graphic novel that deals with homosexuality and racism in the South during the Civil Rights Movement. Throughout his life and career, he helped bring up important conversations – including those about the AIDS crisis throughout the 1970s and 1980s – that weren’t being covered by mainstream media through illustrations of everyday moments within the gay community. His work often pulled from his own personal experiences, and he was a genius at satire.

GK Armstrong ’92 serves as the archivist of the College and the digital initiatives librarian. In their work in these positions, Armstrong has created digital collections for the theatre department, service learning, college publications, and a feature collection on Cruse and his work. Like Cruse, their time at BSC was hugely impactful in their personal and working life, having met their spouse, Dr. Teresa Reed ’89 – one of our featured book club authors – in their first class at BSC and used the liberal arts grounding for a long career as a web designer before becoming an archivist/librarian in 2013. Armstrong’s involvement at ’Southern ranged from poetry to theatre to service learning; their scholarship interests now encompass queer and trans representation in library and information services, archiving for underrepresented populations, punk and creative protest for human rights, and creative writing (poetry.) They were voted Henry Randall Advisor of the Year in 2019-2020 for their work sponsoring Spectrum, an LGBTQ+ alliance group, and as the faculty athletic liaison for women’s soccer.

6:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 23
“Shadows of Mary: Reading the Virgin Mary in Medieval Texts” by Dr. Teresa P. Reed ’89
Facilitator: Dr. Susan K. Hagen, Retired VP for Academic Affairs, Associate Provost, and English Professor
Tags: medieval lit, gender and femininity, theology
Eventbrite Sign-Up Here

In medieval thought, Mary was a virgin, a mother, a daughter, and a wife, alone of all her sex and yet also continually invoked in order to define femininity in general. Shadows of Mary analyzes the figure of the Virgin Mary in medieval theological, philosophical and literary texts in order to understand how stories about her influenced the creation of female characters in both sacred and secular writing. Teresa Reed traces aspects of Marian figuration ranging from Chaucer’s Constance and the Wife of Bath, to the medical woman of the English Trotula, St Margaret of Antioch and the Pearl maiden. She shows how the rhetorical processes through which the medieval church manifested its ideas of truth are caught up in representational anxieties surrounding the body of a woman, and in Mary’s relationship with her shadow, Eve. Shadows of Mary’s detailed analysis of the multiple and often contradictory roles occupied by Mary in medieval thought also opens up ways of exploring the connections between literary representation and social practices. It offers innovative ways for using medieval studies to think through issues that have come to preoccupy contemporary studies of gender and culture.

Dr. Teresa P. Reed ’89 is professor of English at Jacksonville State University, where she has been on faculty since 1996. While her literary specialty is Middle English literature – with which she became obsessed at BSC under the tutelage of now emerita professor, Susan Hagen – Reed’s scholarly interests lie in the areas of medieval culture and literature, feminist and literary theory, and teaching technologies. Her most recent scholarly pursuits range from an investigation of travel – actual and metaphorical – in Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale” to analysis of the 2009 Norwegian movie “Dead Snow” about a spring-break skiing trip interrupted by Nazi zombies. Reed spends much of her time outside of the classroom advising JSU’s English majors.

Dr. Susan K. Hagen taught writing and English literature – with a focus on Chaucer and Middle English literature – at BSC for a little over four decades. During that time, Hagen also served as a Senator for Phi Beta Kappa for 12 years. After her retirement in 2017, she turned her attention from scholarly writing to writing about gardens and their cultural meanings through her website, After Eden. She has also published nature poetry in “The Avocet: A Journal of Nature Poems.” Hagen’s busy public speaking schedule on native plants, pollinators, and international gardens – including, of course, medieval gardens – was put on hiatus by COVID-19, but rescheduling is underway. In October 2021, she and retired BSC Professor of Classics Dr. Samuel Pezzillo, retired professor of classics, will lead a tour, “Following the Pilgrims’ Way,” through Tuscany to medieval pilgrimage churches in Rome.