This year’s book selection for the Alabama Book Festival’s second annual Student Readers Group (SRG) is The Poet of Tolstoy Park by Sonny Brewer! The Alabama Book Festival is held in Montgomery’s Old Alabama Town on the third Saturday in April each year, and the Student Readers Group meets at 9:00 AM.

To read more about Sonny Brewer, click here.

To read the Southern Scribe review of The Poet of Tolstoy Park, click here.

The SRG is an initiative I created for the festival last year to improve its offerings to young people in their teens and early twenties— basically high school and college students. The selection process for the SRG follows a rubric with these basic criteria:

1. The book and/or its author, preferably both, must have an Alabama connection.
2. The book must have obvious educational value.
3. The book must have pricing and availability that make it easily accessible.
4. The author must be able to come to the Alabama Book Festival to discuss the book with the students who have read it.
5. Preferably, the book’s subject matter allows it to be used/taught within a variety of humanities disciplines, e.g. English, history, sociology, cultural studies, etc.

Last year’s inaugural selection for the SRG was Jim Crow and Me: Stories from My Life as a Civil Rights Lawyer by Solomon Seay, Jr.