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Frye Gaillard, writer in residence at the University of South Alabama, has written extensively on southern race relations, politics and culture. He is former Southern Editor at The Charlotte Observer, where he covered Charlotte’s landmark school desegregation controversy, the ill-fated ministry of televangelist Jim Bakker, the funeral of Elvis Presley, and the presidency of Jimmy Carter.
He is the author of more than twenty-five works of nonfiction and winner of multiple literary prizes, including the Lillian Smith Book Award, the Fitzgerald Museum Literary Prize, the Clarence Cason Award, the Alabama Governor’s Award for the Arts, the Jefferson Cup Honor Book, the Gustavus Myers Award, and NPR Great Read of 2018. |
NASCAR and Black Lives Matter
Announcing the March, 2021 re-release of Kyle at 200 M.P.H., commercially the most successful book in Frye Gaillard's forty-year career as an author. Gaillard wrote the book for St. Martin's Press in 1993 as a serious look at the culture and the sport of NASCAR. He decided to follow one driver, Kyle Petty, who was then at the peak of his career, through a season and use that as a framework device for telling the broader NASCAR story at a time of exploding popularity. The book sold through three hardback printings and an updated paperback edition in 1995-96.
"I first thought of bringing it back into print in 2020," said Gaillard, "after Bubba Wallace, a native of my hometown of Mobile and the only African American driver competing at the highest level of NASCAR, drove a car for Richard Petty Motorsports with a Black Lives Matter decal on the rear quarter panel. He also helped persuade NASCAR to ban the display of the Confederate flag at its races. For this, he was vilified, but the Pettys, NASCAR, and several of the sport's most visible drivers stood solidly behind him. None of this surprised me, having gotten to know the Pettys and having come to understand their fundamental decency on the issue of race or any other form of human condescension. I thought the book, with a new Prologue, might serve as a nice background for the current NASCAR moment."
Announcing the March, 2021 re-release of Kyle at 200 M.P.H., commercially the most successful book in Frye Gaillard's forty-year career as an author. Gaillard wrote the book for St. Martin's Press in 1993 as a serious look at the culture and the sport of NASCAR. He decided to follow one driver, Kyle Petty, who was then at the peak of his career, through a season and use that as a framework device for telling the broader NASCAR story at a time of exploding popularity. The book sold through three hardback printings and an updated paperback edition in 1995-96.
"I first thought of bringing it back into print in 2020," said Gaillard, "after Bubba Wallace, a native of my hometown of Mobile and the only African American driver competing at the highest level of NASCAR, drove a car for Richard Petty Motorsports with a Black Lives Matter decal on the rear quarter panel. He also helped persuade NASCAR to ban the display of the Confederate flag at its races. For this, he was vilified, but the Pettys, NASCAR, and several of the sport's most visible drivers stood solidly behind him. None of this surprised me, having gotten to know the Pettys and having come to understand their fundamental decency on the issue of race or any other form of human condescension. I thought the book, with a new Prologue, might serve as a nice background for the current NASCAR moment."
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The Rabbi and Dr. King
In the cover story of the Spring edition of Alabama Heritage, the state’s award-winning historical quarterly, Frye Gaillard writes about the friendship – philosophical and personal – between Rabbi Abraham Heschel and Martin Luther King, Jr. “Heschel, remarkably, was as eloquent as Dr. King,” says Gaillard, “a seventh generation rabbi who understood God not as the omnipotent puppeteer pulling the strings of human history, but as a loving presence in a world full of hurt who needed the help of human beings to heal it. We miss the gentleness and strength of leaders like these.” www.alabamaheritage.com. Live as if... A teacher's love story
In the most deeply personal writing of his long career, Frye Gaillard reflects on the life and work of his wife Nancy, who died of leukemia in 2018. Partly the memoir of a vibrant marriage, Live As If… tells the story of Nancy’s work as a public school teacher, principal, and professor during a time of education under siege. “It’s a story of what can go right,” Gaillard says. Patti Callahan Henry, best-selling author of Becoming Mrs. Lewis, and winner of the Harper Lee Award, offers this assessment: “If a love had a voice and could tell us its story, it would be this one by Frye Gaillard. As Gaillard recounts the extraordinary life of his wife, Nancy, he honors her in revealing her heroism as a teacher, chronicling her resilience, and portraying the courage of her everyday choices and actions. In spirited and generous prose, Gaillard offers us a peek into a life so well-lived, a life so full of courage and generosity, that it changes us just by reading about her.” Lawrence Specker, writing for Al.com, added: “You’ll be glad you knew Nancy Gaillard, after you read ‘Live As If …,’ a tribute written by the late educator’s husband. Partly that’s a tribute to Frye Gaillard’s success in making the book about her, and about the spirit she carried through to the end despite the leukemia, rather than about the disease or about his grief. Gaillard has been adept at turning his viewpoints and insights into books such as his 2018 magnum opus ‘A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s, Our Decade of Hope, Possibility and Innocence Lost.’ In this case, though, the measure of his skill is the extent to which he keeps himself out of it.” Read review here The book can be ordered through Amazon.com. All royalties go to support the Nancy Gaillard Love of Teaching Scholarship and the Stokes Center for Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama, where Nancy retired in 2018. |
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The Broken Road of Peggy Wallace Kennedy
All white Southerners live with the sins of their fathers. But what if your dad was one of the most famous segregationists in history? Veteran Alabama journalist Frye Gaillard visits the daughter of George Wallace. bittersoutherner.com/the-broken-road-of-peggy-wallace-kennedy Story by Frye Gaillard | Photographs by Wes Frazer |
Now Available from NewSouth Books:
THE SLAVE WHO WENT TO CONGRESS
By Marti Rosner and Frye Gaillard, Illustrations by Jordana Haggard
"Striking artwork adds a beautiful touch to this inspirational true story about perseverance, high ideals, and forging history. The Slave Who Went to Congress is a choice pick for personal, school, and public library picturebook collections, highly recommended."
— Children's Bookwatch
“Here is a book that tells a lesser-known story as powerful as that of Frederick Douglass. The Slave Who Went to Congressis the inspiring true account of Benjamin Sterling Turner of Alabama, who after living enslaved for forty years became the the second African American to serve in the U.S. Congress. And it was learning to read that altered Turner’s life! Beautifully written and illustrated.”
— Maryann Macdonald, coauthor of The Little Piano Girl
“Needed now more than ever comes a powerful chapter in American history to share with young readers. This book is a gem.”
— Rita Williams-Garcia, three-time Coretta Scott King Author Award winner
THE SLAVE WHO WENT TO CONGRESS
By Marti Rosner and Frye Gaillard, Illustrations by Jordana Haggard
"Striking artwork adds a beautiful touch to this inspirational true story about perseverance, high ideals, and forging history. The Slave Who Went to Congress is a choice pick for personal, school, and public library picturebook collections, highly recommended."
— Children's Bookwatch
“Here is a book that tells a lesser-known story as powerful as that of Frederick Douglass. The Slave Who Went to Congressis the inspiring true account of Benjamin Sterling Turner of Alabama, who after living enslaved for forty years became the the second African American to serve in the U.S. Congress. And it was learning to read that altered Turner’s life! Beautifully written and illustrated.”
— Maryann Macdonald, coauthor of The Little Piano Girl
“Needed now more than ever comes a powerful chapter in American history to share with young readers. This book is a gem.”
— Rita Williams-Garcia, three-time Coretta Scott King Author Award winner
Now Available from NewSouth Books:
A HARD RAIN:
America in the 1960s, Our Decade of Hope, Possibility, and Innocence Lost.
Winner of the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum Literary Prize
Governor's Arts Award, Alabama State Council on the Arts
NPR Great Read of 2018
“Masterful… Gaillard writes with determination to make the events of the 1960s relevant. He is a gifted storyteller, and I’m giving copies of this book to my sons and daughter to help them understand how we got to now.”
– Timothy J. McNulty, The Chicago Tribune
"...smart, readable ... at once personal and universal... An illuminating, you-are-there view of events on the ground in the turbulent 1960s."
– Kirkus
"A totally absorbing read! Frye Gaillard takes us there and makes it all so real that we forget we're reading. Older readers will feel young, uncertain, and idealistic again. Younger readers will hope to find the courage of the 1960's--in politics, in artistic expression, in science--to improve the lot of all humankind on this precious earth. Gaillard's A Hard Rain is worthy of the best literary prizes our country can bestow."
– Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab's Wife, Four Spirits, and Abundance
“A child of the Sixties and one of the leading civil-rights reporters of his generation, Frye Gaillard has given us a riveting tour along what he calls the fine line between history and journalism. As a reporter he has witnessed a great deal and interviewed many of the key figures of the decade that shaped America’s future while breaking its heart. As a scholar he has read widely and thought deeply about our nation’s halting pursuit of justice and mercy for all. A Hard Rain is essential reading for a time when an American president has willfully ignored the hard-earned lessons from our passage through the most tumultuous decade of social change since the Civil War.”
– Howell Raines, former New York Times Executive Editor, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Click Here to read an excerpt of A Hard Rain
A HARD RAIN:
America in the 1960s, Our Decade of Hope, Possibility, and Innocence Lost.
Winner of the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum Literary Prize
Governor's Arts Award, Alabama State Council on the Arts
NPR Great Read of 2018
“Masterful… Gaillard writes with determination to make the events of the 1960s relevant. He is a gifted storyteller, and I’m giving copies of this book to my sons and daughter to help them understand how we got to now.”
– Timothy J. McNulty, The Chicago Tribune
"...smart, readable ... at once personal and universal... An illuminating, you-are-there view of events on the ground in the turbulent 1960s."
– Kirkus
"A totally absorbing read! Frye Gaillard takes us there and makes it all so real that we forget we're reading. Older readers will feel young, uncertain, and idealistic again. Younger readers will hope to find the courage of the 1960's--in politics, in artistic expression, in science--to improve the lot of all humankind on this precious earth. Gaillard's A Hard Rain is worthy of the best literary prizes our country can bestow."
– Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab's Wife, Four Spirits, and Abundance
“A child of the Sixties and one of the leading civil-rights reporters of his generation, Frye Gaillard has given us a riveting tour along what he calls the fine line between history and journalism. As a reporter he has witnessed a great deal and interviewed many of the key figures of the decade that shaped America’s future while breaking its heart. As a scholar he has read widely and thought deeply about our nation’s halting pursuit of justice and mercy for all. A Hard Rain is essential reading for a time when an American president has willfully ignored the hard-earned lessons from our passage through the most tumultuous decade of social change since the Civil War.”
– Howell Raines, former New York Times Executive Editor, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Click Here to read an excerpt of A Hard Rain
A Hard Rain Reader Soundtrack
A Hard Rain Readers’ Soundtrack – Listen to these songs on Spotify
(Compiled by Justine Burbank and Frye Gaillard)
(Compiled by Justine Burbank and Frye Gaillard)
