On Reading
Foster Dickson is a writer, editor, and teacher in Montgomery, Alabama. He is the author of Closed Ranks and I Just Make People Up, and the editor of Nobody’s Home: Modern Southern Folklore.
*Read Dirty Boots: When Reading Meant Everything
or Dirty Boots: A Joyous and Inexplicably Necessary Thing
book review of Southern Bred by Charles Ghigna
for the Alabama Writers Forum, published in December 2025
Review: In Search of the Silent South by Morton Sosna
on Nobody’s Home, October 2025
book review of Year in Review 2024 by Out Loud Huntsville
for the Alabama Writers Forum, published in July 2025
book review of More Poems for Hungry Minds by The Highland Avenue Poets
for the Alabama Writers Forum, published in April 2025
Reading: Smokehole by Martin Shaw
March 2025
Reading: Earnest Occupations by Richard Hague
February 2025
Reading: Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin
November 2024
Reading: The Shadow of a Great Rock by Harold Bloom
September 2024
book review of From Every Stormy Wind that Blows by S. Jonathon Bass
for the Alabama Writers Forum, published in July 2024
book review of Glass Cabin by Tina Mozelle Braziel and James Braziel
for the Alabama Writers Forum, published in July 2024
Reading: Loving our Enemies by Jim Forest
July 2024
Reading Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State by Andrew Gelman
from the Editor’s Reading List on Nobody’s Home, May 2024
Throwback Thursday: The Haiku Year, 2004
April 2024
Reading: The Gospel of Life by Pope John Paul II
March 2024
Southern Politics in the 1990s by Alexander P. Lamis
from the Editor’s Reading List on Nobody’s Home, February 2024
Reading: The Catholic Teacher by James D. Kyrilo
November 2023
The South of the Mind by Zachary J. Lechner
from the Editor’s Reading List on Nobody’s Home, October 2023
book review of Versions of May by Jim Murphy
for the Alabama Writers Forum, published in September 2023
Reading: Ninety-Two in the Shade by Thomas McGuane
July 2023
book review of Outside from the Inside by Anne Whitehouse
for the Alabama Writers Forum, published July 2023
(Re-)Reading: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
June 2023
South to a Very Old Place by Albert Murray
from the Editor’s Reading List on Nobody’s Home, June 2023
book review of Freedom’s Dominion by Jefferson Cowie
for the Alabama Writers Forum, published April 2023
Biracial Politics by Chandler Davidson
from the Editor’s Reading List on Nobody’s Home, March 2023
Reading: The Essential Haiku and Extraordinary Zen Masters
February 2023
The Politics of White Rights by Joseph Bagley
from the Editor’s Reading List on Nobody’s Home, December 2022
Cathedrals of Kudzu by Hal Crowther
from the Editor’s Reading List on Nobody’s Home, October 2022
One South by John Shelton Reed
from the Editor’s Reading List on Nobody’s Home, June 2022
Reading: Sky Above, Great Wind by Kazuaki Tanahashi
March 2022
The Omni-Americans by Albert Murray
from the Editor’s Reading List on Nobody’s Home, March 2022
Reading: The Return of the Prodigal Son by Henry Nouwen
January 2022
Media-Made Dixie by Jack Temple Kirby
from the Editor’s Reading List on Nobody’s Home, January 2022
A Movement of the People by Katie Lamar Jackson
from the Editor’s Reading List on Nobody’s Home, December 2021
Heritage and Hate by Stephen M. Monroe
from the Editor’s Reading List on Nobody’s Home, November 2021
The South Never Plays Itself by Ben Beard
from the Editor’s Reading List on Nobody’s Home, September 2021
Outside the Southern Myth by Noel Polk
from the Editor’s Reading List on Nobody’s Home, July 2021
The Silent Majority by Matthew Lassiter
from the Editor’s Reading List on Nobody’s Home, June 2021
South to a New Place, edited by Suzanne W. Jones and Sharon Monteith
from the Editor’s Reading List on Nobody’s Home, May 2021
Myth and Southern History, Volume 2: The New South, edited by Patrick Gerster and Nicholas Cords
from the Editor’s Reading List on Nobody’s Home, March 2021
The Two-Party South by Alexander P. Lamis
from the Editor’s Reading List on Nobody’s Home, February 2021
Myth, Media, and the Southern Mind by Stephen A. Smith
from the Editor’s Reading List on Nobody’s Home, January 2021
Reading: Still Life with Oysters and Lemon by Mark Doty
January 2021
The Countercultural South by Jack Temple Kirby
from the Editor’s Reading List on Nobody’s Home, December 2020
Judgment & Grace in Dixie by Charles Reagan Wilson
from the Editor’s Reading List on Nobody’s Home, November 2020
Reading: Widespread Panic on the Streets of Athens, Georgia by Gordon Lamb
originally published on level:deepsouth, October 2020
Reading: Woodrow’s Trumpet by Tim LcLaurin
September 2020
Reading: Black Elk Speaks by Jim Neihardt
September 2020
Reading: St. Marks is Dead by Ada Calhoun
September 2020
Reading: Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
August 2020
Reading: Love Letter to the Earth by Thich Nhat Hanh
May 2020
Reading: The Death of Innocents by Sister Helen Prejean
May 2020
Reading: Whose Votes Count? by Abigail Thernstrom
May 2020
Reading: How to Write a Sentence by Stanley Fish
April 2020
Reading: Let the Dead Bury their Dead by Randall Kenan
April 2020
Reading: The Seven Story Mountain by Thomas Merton
February 2020
Reading: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
January 2020
Reading: A Letter Concerning Toleration by John Locke
January 2020
Dirty Boots: When Reading Meant Everything
August 2019
Dirty Boots: Reading, Writing, and How to “Fix” Education
February 2019
book review of Hard Rain by Frye Gaillard
for the Alabama Writers Forum, published February 2019
Dirty Boots: Reading Dreams of Africa in Alabama by Sylvan Diouf
January 2019
Dirty Boots: Reading and the Truths on our Doorsteps
December 2018
Reading: A Gathering of Old Men by Ernest Gaines
June 2018
Reading: Apocalypse South by Anthony Dyer Hoefer
May 2018
book review of American Happiness by Jacqueline Trimble
for the Alabama Writers Forum, published January 2018
Dirty Boots: Could close reading save the world?
January 2017
Reading: Off Magazine Street by Everett Capps
October 2016
Reading: WAPO’s “A Region Left Behind Series”
February 2016
Reading: The Dog Star by Donald Windham
December 2015
Reading: Three Books on the Modern Deep South
February 2015
Reading: Lazarus, Come Forth! by John Dear
October 2014
Reading: Three Books on Teaching and Education
July 2014
Reading: The Undivided Past: Humanity Beyond our Differences
July 2014
Reading: Three Books on the Arts and Humanities
June 2014
Reading: Three Books on the Southern History
May 2014
Reading: The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
June 2013
Reading: The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day, Part One and Two and Three
May 2013
Reading: Train Whistle Guitar by Albert Murray
May 2013
The Dixie Limited, Part One, Part Two, and Part Three
June – July 2012
Reading: Not for Profit by Martha Nussbaum, Part One, Two, and Three
December 2011 – January 2012
Reading: Joe Turner’s Come and Gone by August Wilson
June 2011
Reading: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
June 2011
Reading: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom by August Wilson
June 2011
Reading: The Piano Lesson by August Wilson
May 2011
Reading: Mostly Poetry Criticism and Theory
May 2011
Reading: A Poet’s Anti-Rule Book by Steve Kowit
May 2011
Reading: Radical Equations by Robert Moses, Part One and Two
April 2011
Reading: Strange Fruit by Lillian Smith
March 2011
Reading Multicultural Hybridity by Laurie Grobman, Part One, Two, Three, and The Final Word
February – March 2011
Reading: Grendel by John Gardner
January 2011
Foster Dickson 