A plethora of poets, writers and readers abounded at the Alabama Writers Symposium in Monroeville, April 25 through 27. Published and unpublished, alike, hobnobbed and networked, learned and listened to the best of the best share insights of their craft. The highlight of the Symposium's festivities, the Awards Luncheon held on April 26, honored Gay Talese with the Harper Lee Award for Alabama's Distinguished Writer, and Sue Walker with the Eugene Current-Garcia Award for Alabama's Distinguished Literary Scholar.

Both recipients received $5,000 cash and The Clock Tower Bronze award statues by Frank Fleming during the Awards Luncheon. The awards are funded by a grant from George Landegger as an annual part of the Alabama Writers Symposium.

Harper Lee Award winner Gay Talese

Jeanie Thompson of the Alabama Writers' Forum offered a glimpse into the atmosphere Talese set.

“Standing before us to receive the Harper Lee Award last Friday in Monroeville as part of the Alabama Writers Symposium, Talese was obviously moved,” she reported. “Though not an Alabamian by birth, Talese found his way here and discovered his calling for a lifetime as a reporter. 'I saw. I was there,' he told us the next day at the courthouse, referring again to his professional creed to report on the scene. The Alabama Writers’ Forum is very proud to have selected Gay Talese for the 2013 Harper Lee Award. Like no other writer, he has given us a view of our state through many layers of history, and he encourages us to consider again who we are and where we have been.”

A New Jersey native and former New York Times reporter, Gay Talese shared fond memories of his connections to Alabama and the role those connections played in his writing life.

He began by thanking a Birmingham native, Dr. Aldrich J. Crowe who moved to Ocean City, N.J. during The Great Depression, for his admittance into the University of Alabama.

During his acceptance speech, Talese recalled this unlikely tale of the man who ensured his opportunity to have a college career.

“My father mentioned to Dr. Crowe how disappointed he was that I wouldn't get into college because my grades were so terrible,” Talese revealed. “He (Crowe) said, 'How about Alabama?' He said, 'I can do that.' And he did. Dr. Crow, who knew how to play politics in Alabama style, got me in.”

He also thanked a friend from his junior year French class at the University, Jimmy Pinkston of Mississippi, who suggested Talese call upon his cousin, New York Times managing editor Tuner Catledge, for a job after graduation.

Talese painted a vivid picture of a new graduate on a bus headed to the Big Apple, crowded New York streets and a large, loud New York Times office where he called upon Catledge. The editor hesitated at the mention of his relative, Jimmy Pinkston, who turned out to be a very distant and unknown cousin.

Talese continued in his quest for employment with, “I just graduated from Alabama and I'd like to be a journalist.”

He said he told Catledge about his experience writing “Sports Gay-zing” for the Crimson-White student newspaper.

He said that Catledge replied, “Young man, people who get a job here have to have experience.”

Talese explained that he was contacted a few weeks later with a job offer as a copy boy, which he began in 1953 and led to his 10-year career as a reporter with the New York Times.

In a subsequent interview by Don Noble, host of Alabama Public Television's “Bookmark,” Talese divulged that “There was absolutely no culture shock” between his northeastern U.S. upbringing and his college and career submersion in the South.

He offered that Ocean City, N.J.'s Methodist ministers demanded a zero-tolerance, high-morals environment. His birth in 1932 offered a consciousness of the prior to WWII period. This coupling gave him small-town understanding along with a united sense of the U.S.

“There was no social conscious then as there is today,” he said as he recalled Ku Klux Klan members trotting along the Ocean City boardwalk, “like they were part of the community.”

I learned about small-town power: a political, social and racial sense no different than the deep South,” he explained. “I always had curiosity — the capacity to wonder.”

He recalled turbulent racial times as he reported for the New York Times; he interviewed Vivian Malone, the University of Alabama's first, black graduate and covered the Selma March and Bloody Sunday.

“I saw that; I wrote that,” he said. “I was writing about the Alabama that I knew and I thought about that I didn't grow up any differently.”

“The New York Times taught me to have it right, not necessarily first,” he divulged. “I was there. I wrote what I saw, not what I heard second hand.”

He told of the movie theater in Ocean City that had a separate balcony for black movie goers, but he added that New Jersey didn't have a Martin Luther King or a John Lewis fighting.

“They (society) acted like what happened in Selma was at odds with the rest of the nation — not true, not true,” he said. “There is a change that is admirable, all that is lacking is a clear memory. We changed together, we from the North and you from the South. What made it different, was the definition of what was newsworthy.”

Gulf Coast Newspapers' The Courier editor Mike Odom, finished out the April 27 author session after being recognized as “my fellow journalist” by Talese, asking for him to give his opinion on the future of newspapers.

“When will be the last day the New York Times is in print and what can we do about it?” he posed fearlessly to the giant of journalism.

Talese responded by saying, “News has to be well informed and there has to be a standard to what a journalist is.”

Talese restated the question and gave his answer.

“Will the New York Times close shop and be all online?” he asked. “I certainly hope not and don't think so. What print media has to do is get better at what it does. Storytelling, people never get tired of storytelling.”

Eugene Current-Garcia award winner Sue Walker

Sue Walker's recent publications include her book, “Faulkner Suite” by Oeoco Press, “Freida Lawrence: Blood, Lust, Desperation” in the “Alaska Quarterly Review,” “Ancestral Voices: A Litany of Ghosts” in the “Alhambra Poetry Calendar 2009,” a book review of “The Calpocalypse: An Allegory in Verse” by Maurice Gandy and “Celebrate the Delta,” in Mobile Bay Monthly. Upcoming publications include “The Box Under The Bed” in “Thema,” “Binary Measure” for the anthology “Writing By Ear” by Motebooks Publishers, “Menieres” in the Journal of the American Medical Association and a play entitled “ Cognac in Coffee, Oysters in Champagne” accepted for publication by Midway.

Walker has acted as Regional Coordinator of the State of Alabama’s participation in the National Poetry Out Loud recitation and award program where she conducted workshops at Daphne High School, Theodore High School and Southern Choctaw High School; Co-Chair of the Alabama Literary Trail, a program that features literary programs and events in the state in conjunction with programs in Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia and Florida; she arranged the Stokes Literary Event featuring nationally acclaimed authors Charles Bernstein, Hank Lazer and Marjorie Perloff; and she sponsors Poetry Theatre USA, a monthly event at Satori Coffee House featuring an opportunity for USA students to hone original poetry reading skills.

The poet laureate of the state until 2012 and Stokes Distinguished Scholar at the University of South Alabama, approached the podium during the Alabama Writers Symposium's Awards Luncheon to accept the Eugene Current-Garcia Award for Alabama's Distinguished Literary Scholar.

She formed a wide smile, expressed her thanks for the honor she had received, and acknowledged a special connection with the literary capital of Alabama, Monroeville, and with it's heroine Harper Lee, author of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

“I started out teaching in the eighth grade before I went to graduate school,” she announced, “and the first novel I taught was 'To Kill a Mockingbird' so that's a very special book for me.”

She paused, and looked directly out into the audience as she said, “If it weren't for teachers, I wouldn't be here.”

“In high school, my 10th-grade and 12th-grade English teacher taught us that you had to qualify to speak,” she said. “That meant you had to think seriously about what you were going to say before you could speak again. She also taught me my first lesson in writing criticism. It was on Lady Macbeth: was it a faint or fake-a-faint?”

In her Saturday session with moderator Jennifer Horne, who's publications include “Bottle Tree” in 2010 and “Working the Dirt” in 2003, Walker discussed her current project that she's temporarily entitled “Cats.”

She said that, “it's an A to Z about women,” as she went through the alphabet citing women whose names begin with each letter and explained their significance in history.

She divulged that she's currently worked up to the letter M and revealed “the significance of naming an identity.”

She delighted the audience with a short reading of the work-in-progress that included this phrase: “Go forth and try on names like dresses, like bonnets, like silk panties she could now afford.”

Fairhope writing group, Pensters President P.T. Paul described her former professor, thus.

“It’s not uncommon to say that a professor inspired you – that is the phrase most frequently used by students to express their admiration for a former teacher – but it is uncommon to say that a professor goaded, embarrassed and frustrated you by their own innate, unrelenting scholarship,” Paul said. “And, of course, she never meant to evoke those reactions from me, or from any of her other students, I’m certain, but it’s the inevitable result when you are a scholar of the magnitude of Dr. Sue Walker. As an undergraduate, I learned that her course materials would be diverse and challenging, and I found myself immersed in poetry that I never knew was being written, but I had difficulty keeping pace with her recommendations, nor could I hope to match her output. She was, quite simply, the most maddening professor that I have ever studied under, and my only ambition is to be half the scholar she is, and to write even a fraction of the amazing poetry that she has produced.”