Sandsquiggles's Blog

The 2011 Alabama Writers’ Conclave is fortunate to have State Poet Laureate, Dr. Sue B. Walker, as a faculty member, leading the conference workshop in Poetry.  Recently Dr. Walker has been asked by the National League of American Pen Women in Washington DC to do a workshop for them in April.  To learn more about Dr. Walker and her credits, please read the more detailed bio posted below. 

In addition to Poetry, workshops in Fiction, Nonfiction, and Memoir are also be held at the upcoming Alabama Writers’ Conclave.  This year the conference is being held in Huntsville, AL, from July 15 – 17 at the Marriott next to the Space and Rocket Center.  For more information visit the AWC website, www.alabamawritersconclave.org.  There is still time to register and not miss out on Dr. Walker’s workshop or any of the others.

Sue Brannan Walker

            Dr. Sue Brannan Walker is Poet Laureate of Alabama, the Stokes Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the Stokes Center for Creative Writing, and Professor of English at the University of South Alabama where she teaches courses in creative writing. She and her students are proud of their class poetry projects, namely working with Place 15 in Mobile, Alabama where they teach writing to the Homeless.

            Dr. Walker is a poet, playwright, professor, scholar, author, and Publisher of Negative Capability Press. She has eight published books of poetry, has edited four national literary anthologies, had work published in more than fifteen anthologies, published more that fifty critical articles, and is known for her critical work on Southern writers, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and James Dickey.

            Dr. Walker has won the Alabama-Writer’s Conclave Play-Writing competition for her one-woman, one-act play based on the life of Mobile’s Madame Octavia LeVert. She has subsequently performed the play at the Firehouse Theater in Mobile, at Oakleigh, in New Orleans, Gulf Shores, and other local venues.  For her research on Octavia Le Vert, she was awarded an Elizabeth B. Gould Research Award from the Mobile Historic Development Commission.

            Included among Dr. Walker’s awards is the William Crawford Gorgas Award from the Alabama Medical Association for significant work by a lay person in the medical field for Life on the Line: Selections on Words and Healing.  This book also received the Book of the Century Award from the Alabama State Poetry Society.  Dr. Walker has received the Mobile YWCA Woman of Achievement Award and the
Mobile Arts Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2006.She was the First Lady of Mobile  in 2006. Dr. Walker publishes in the field of Medical Humanities and has served on the University of South Alabama Medical Admissions Committee. She has served as Chair of the Disabilities Committee for the National Modern Language Association.

            Dr. Walker has been a recipient of an Alabama Council on the Arts Individual Writers Fellowship. Dr. Walker has received a citation from the city of Birmingham for her literary achievements and been honored by Sue Walker Day in Foley, Alabama, has served as President of the Alabama State Poetry Society and the State President of the Alabama National League of American Pen Women, President of the Mobile Chapter of the National League of American Pen Woman, and The Pensters.  She is a member of the Sigma Tau Delta Honor Society, the Golden Key National Honor Society, Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society, and Sigma Tau Delta Honor Society.

            Dr.  Walker has won the Hackney Literary Award for fiction and has published poetry and fiction in more than sixty national journals. Her work as editor and publisher of the literary journal Negative Capability journal was recognized by Writer’s Digest where it was declared the most 3^rd prestigious literary journal in United States in the 1990s.

            Faulkner Suite, a collection of poems about William Faulkner was published by Oeonoco Press in 2008. Whatever Remembers Us: An Anthology of Alabama poetry , was a Southern Booksellers Best Poetry Book finalist in 2008.  She is completing a critical book on James Dickey and Deep Ecology, and working on a novel on the yellow fever epidemic in Mobile in 1878.  A book on the Mobile-Tensaw Delta came out in early 2004 from NewSouth Press.

            Dr. Walker is a graduate of the University of Alabama where she received a B.S. degree in Education and Tulane University where she received M.Ed,  M.A. and Ph.D. degrees.