Rick Bragg, at his home in 2004. (JSU/Steve Latham Photo)

Rick Bragg Comes Home to JSU
on Monday, May 11

On the Brink, Jacksonville State University's Conference on Emerging Southern Writers, in conjunction with the Friends of the Houston Cole Library, will present A Rick Bragg Homecoming on Monday, May 11, 2009 at 7 p.m. in the Leone Cole Auditorium.

The event is Bragg's first hometown book event and is part of a 12-city promotional tour for the paperback release of his most recent novel, The Prince of Frogtown. Admission to the event is free and copies of Bragg's books will be available for purchase.

"Rick Bragg's tales of his rough-and-tumble Alabama upbringing have captivated and entertained millions of readers, yet crucial parts of the story still remained to be told. Now, Bragg closes the circle of his bestselling family saga that began with All Over but the Shoutin' and continued with Ava's Man with The Prince of Frogtown. In his third and final installment, Bragg comes to terms with fatherhood-- with the father he had all but written out of his life story, and the father he chooses to become.

"Bragg calls his ten-year-old stepson 'The Boy,' and considers him the most vexing part of the strange new life he acquires upon falling in love with and marrying the boy's mother. Finding himself a reluctant and inadequate father figure to an impressionable kid, Bragg is forced to reexamine his own childhood, and the hard-drinking, high-tempered and largely absent father who may have had more influence on the man Bragg became than he’d like to admit. With his signature candor and humor, he paints an indelible portrait of three Bragg generations getting by in a blue-collar mill town, finally examining the legacy of his troubled, charismatic hustler father who both haunts Bragg and helps him take on the mysteries and magic of parenthood himself.

"The Prince of Frogtown is a brilliant and moving rumination on the struggles between boys and men, the power of memory, and the passion and pride that mend old ties and create new ones. It has earned him the prestigious Harper Lee Award as a Distinguished Alabama Writer."

--Julia Baxter, Associate Publicist
Vintage Books, a division of Random House

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Praise for Rick Bragg

"By turns gut-wrenching, hilarious and heartbreaking... A way of looking hard at the past in order to break free of it." --The Petersburg Times

"Vivid.... An evocative family memoir." -- The Boston Globe

"It is a rare writer indeed who can craft three memoirs out of his or her own life and relations. Being a storyteller par excellence has a lot to do with it.... And that's why Rick Bragg has come forth with his second memoir after All Over but the Shoutin'." -- Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"Rick Bragg has made of the dark shadow in his life a figure of fles and blood, passion and tragedy, and a father, at last, whose memory he can live with. And that is no small thing for any man to do." --The New York Times Book Review

"This book is powerful.... [Bragg is] a storyteller on a par with Pat Conroy." -- The Denver Post

"With The Prince of Frogtown, Bragg finds a heartening truth: He is not doomed to take up the defects of his forebears but learns instead to use the as a compass. In the author's skillful hands, readers will relish the journey." -- Rocky Mountain News

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About Rick Bragg

Bragg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of bestselling and critically acclaimed books on the people of the foothills of the Appalachians-- All Over but the Shoutin', Ava's Man, and The Prince of Frogtown. Bragg, a native of Calhoun County, calls these books the proudest examples of his writing life, what historians and critics have described as heartbreaking anthems of people usually written about only in fiction or cliches. He chronicles the lives of his family, cotton pickers, mill workers, whiskey makers, long sufferers, and fist fighters. Bragg, who has written for numerous magazines, ranging from Sports Illustrated to Food & Wine, was a newspaper writer for two decades, covering high school football for the Jacksonville News, and militant Islamic fundamentalism for The New York Times. He has won more than fifty significant writing awards in books and journalism, including, twice, the American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1993, and is, truthfully, still a freshman at Jacksonville State University. Bragg is currently Professor of Writing in the Journalism Department at the University of Alabama, and lives in Tuscaloosa with his wife, Dianne, a doctoral student there, and his stepson, Jake. His only real hobby is fishing, but he is the worst fisherman in his family line.

 

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