SWWC 2000 Highlights
Nikki Giovanni
After her presentation, Giovanni talked with a Berry student (left) and posed with a group of students from Main Elementary, a Rome City School.
Theme
The theme for the 2000 conference was "Remembrance." Speakers and presenters explored the ways in which individual and collective memory informs and is represented in the work of southern women writers. "The memory is a living thing--it too is in transit. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and lives--the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead." --Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginning
June Spence
June Spence was the Berry College Writer in Residence from 1999-2000. Here, she gives a presentation at the 2000 conference.
Good Ol' Girls
On Friday night of the 2000 Conference, before a packed house at the Ford Auditorium, Matraca Berg, Marshall Chapman, and Lee Smith performed a special "writers' version" of Good Ol' Girls, a musical revue based on characters in the works of Lee Smith and Jill McCorkle. Nashville singer-songwriters Berg and Chapman wrote songs inspired by those characters and then collaborated with McCorkle and Smith to create the show, a cycle of songs and monologues that presents a very colorful array of southern women speaking their minds on the subjects of love, sex, sin, and redemption, among other topics. Good Ol' Girls has been performed by a theatrical troupe and plans are underway to take the revue on the road once again.
Book Signing
At the book signing, conference attendees had an opportunity to speak with the writers. Sitting, clockwise from left: Mary Louise Weaks, Carolyn Perry, Peggy Prenshaw, Lee Smith, and Lorraine Johnson-Coleman.