Ed Southern

Ed Southern is the author of Parlous Angels (Press 53, 2009), Fight Songs: A Story of Love and Sports in a Complicated South (2021, Blair), and two other books. His shorter work, in a variety of genres, has appeared in The Bitter Southerner, storySouth, North Carolina Literary Review, North Carolina 10×10 Festival, South Writ Large, The Dirty Spoon, Asheville Poetry Review, and Wake Forest Magazine, among others. Since 2008 he has been the executive director of the North Carolina Writers’ Network, one of the largest writers’ organizations of its kind in the country. In 2015 he won the Fortner Award for service to the literary arts in North Carolina.

Praise for Parlous Angels

“Ed Southern's stories are about hard work and hard times and what is required of a boy to become a man in such a place and time. They are also about class—that taboo subject in America—and about anger, love, and yearning. Carefully written, with the best dialogue I've read in years, these terrific and utterly original stories are made to last—like a stone pathway or a brick wall.”

  —Lee Smith, author of On Agate Hill and The Last Girls

”Ed Southern has written a luminous collection of stories, chronicling the life and times of several generations of a family in the North Carolina piedmont. As the time and place become more complex, so do the people evolve from rural working-class men to urban intellectuals with new moral conflicts to contend with. This is a thoughtful and perceptive work, written with skill and affection by a Tarheel born and bred.”

  —Sharyn McCrumb, author of St. Dale and Once Around the Track