Press Release - For Immediate Release

Media Contact: Hayley Richards

(334) 353-1881 or hayley.richards@archives.alabama.gov

Montgomery, AL (8/7/2023) – The Alabama Department of Archives & History (ADAH) will continue its 2023 Food For Thought lunchtime lecture series on Thursday, August 17, at 12 p.m. CT. Author Ed Southern will present Fight Songs: A Story of Love and Sports in a Complicated South. The program will be held in the ADAH’s Joseph M. Farley Alabama Power Auditorium in Montgomery. It will also be livestreamed on the ADAH’s Facebook page and YouTube channel. Admission is FREE.

This presentation will explore the connections and contradictions in the South between the sports teams people root for and the places they call home. Southern will examine how the region’s history has shaped its fervor for college sports and the conflict that exists between the values sports are meant to instill and the high stakes business they now encompass.

Ed Southern is the author of Fight Songs: A Story of Love and Sports in a Complicated South (Blair/Carolina Wrenn Press, 2021). He is the executive director of the North Carolina Writer’s Network. In 2015, Southern won the Fortner Award in honor of his service to the literary arts in North Carolina. His other works have appeared in the Bitter Southerner, storySouth, the North Carolina Literary Review, South Writ Large, The Dirty Spoon, the Asheville Poetry Review, and Wake Forest Magazine, among others.

Copies of Fight Songs: A Story of Love and Sports in a Complicated South will be available for purchase at the event.

For additional information, contact Alex Colvin at alex.colvin@archives.alabama.gov or (334) 353-4689. A complete schedule of our 2023 lunchtime lecture series is available at archives.alabama.gov. Food for Thought 2023 is sponsored by the Alabama Humanities Alliance and the Friends of the Alabama Archives. 

The Alabama Department of Archives and History is the state’s government-records repository, a special-collections library and research facility, and home to the Museum of Alabama, the state history museum. It is located in downtown Montgomery, directly across Washington Avenue from the State Capitol. The Museum of Alabama is open Monday through Saturday from 8:30 to 4:30. The EBSCO Research Room is open Tuesday through Saturday from 8:30 to 4:30. To learn more, visit www.archives.alabama.gov or call (334) 242-4364.

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Alabama Department of Archives & History

624 Washington Ave.

Montgomery, AL 36130

www.archives.alabama.gov