A collaboration between Georgia State University Perimeter College and the Georgia Center for the Book, Revival: Lost Southern Voices (RLSV) celebrates its ninth year with a three-day festival of in-person events, from March 20-22, 2025.

Join us for the RLSV 2025 - Keynote–A Conversation with Mab Segrest and E.R. Anderson in Celebration of the Life and Work of Dorothy Allison–in Thursday, March 20, at 7 p.m. ET in-person at the Decatur Library. 

Charis Circle Executive Director, E.R. Anderson, will interview author Mab Segrest about her decades long friendship with Dorothy Allison, their correspondence regarding the Southern Grotesque, and what it can teach us for today’s precarious times. The program will be followed by a reception, and we invite you to stay and continue the conversation!

About Mab Segrest: 

Mab Segrest was born in 1949 in Birmingham, Alabama, and grew up in Tuskegee where her family on both sides had lived for over a century. Steeped in its white version of southern history, she grew up into the crucible of the civil rights movement. Her childhood experience in Alabama’s apartheid culture shaped her future work as an activist, writer and scholar. As a young woman, she left Alabama for graduate school in North Carolina, earning a PhD in English literature from Duke University in 1979. In North Carolina and across the country, dynamic, multiracial feminist and lesbian movements gave her the context to unpack her bags and sort them through as writer, activist, teacher, and public intellectual. My Mama’s Dead Squirrel: Lesbian Essays on Southern Culture (Firebrand, 1985) collected her earliest essays from the late 1970s and early 1980s. Memoir of a Race Traitor (South End, 1994) reflected on the legacies of her white Alabama childhood that inspired her to work with others in the 1980s countering Klan and neo-Nazi movements in North Carolina that were then the most virulent in the nation. This book rapidly became a landmark work of white anti-racist activism. The New Press published a 25th anniversary edition in September 2019. In the 1990s, Segrest worked for the World Council of Churches (WCC), an ecumenical organization based in Geneva, helping to map transformative justice movements across the globe. The essays of Born to Belonging: Writings on Spirit and Justice (2002) rose out of the WCC experience. Segrest returned to her first-love of teaching in 2002 and chaired the Gender and Women’s Studies Department at Connecticut College from 2002 until 2014, serving as the Fuller-Maathai Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies. In the 21st century, Segrest returned intellectually and creatively to the South for a deep dive into the archives of Georgia’s state mental hospital in Milledgeville. After a fifteen-year grappling, the result is Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum (The New Press in April 2020). Segrest has been a Mellon Distinguished Professor at Tulane, a Fellow at Emory’s James Weldon Johnson Institute, the Newell Visiting Scholar at Georgia College and State University, and a Fellow at the National Humanities Center. In 2018 after spending five years in Brooklyn, she returned to Durham where she now lives, writes, and organizes.

About the Conversation partner: E.R. Anderson is the Executive Director of Charis Circle, the non-profit programming arm of Charis Books and More, the South's oldest independent feminist bookstore. He is a lifelong bookseller and writer, and an occasional professor of Women's Gender and Sexuality studies at Agnes Scott College. One of the great joys of his life was having the honor of "opening" for Dorothy Allison twice.

Keynote

Remembering Dorothy Allison: Mab Segrest with E.R. Anderson

Readings and Conversation

This event will take place in the Auditorium of Decatur Library. Registration requested.

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The full festival program featuring bios and more information about RLSV 2025 will be available soon.

About the Festival: Revival: Lost Southern Voices celebrates historically excluded, erased, or marginalized Southern voices. During this annual literary festival, presenters discuss Southern authors or artists whose works are out-of-print or otherwise do not receive the attention they deserve. We invite the public, scholars, students, writers, and inquisitive readers to join the conversation as we continue to discover and revive these Lost Southern Voices.

This festival is free and open to the public, but we welcome donations if you'd like to support our work.