Southern Sin ― True Stories of the Sultry South and Women Behaving Badly

These stories may be from the South, but there are no shy, retiring belles here! Whether remembering of the power of a cheerleading uniform or flirting with another woman’s husband, the women in this collection of true stories play with fire ? sometimes literally. These stories range from the poetic and personal ? dancing warm nights away with strangers and renting out rooms to adulterers with an exhibitionistic streak ? to the journalistic, including a piece about Willie Carter Sharpe, the ?queen of Roanoke rum runners,” as well as a story about Alice Mitchell and Freda Ward, whose plan to run away and live as ?man” and wife ended in scandal and murder in 1892. This collection includes contributions by Southern women from a broad range of circumstances and stages of life: teenage cheerleaders, middle-aged lesbians struggling to find acceptance from their aging parents, and Atlanta divorcees trying to get back into the dating game.

Lee Gutkind has been exploring the world of medicine through writing for over 20 years. He is the author of Many Sleepless Nights: The World of Organ Transplantation, and the editor of four anthologies about health and medicine: Silence Kills: Speaking Out and Saving Lives; Rage and Reconciliation: Inspiring a Health Care Revolution; Healing; and Becoming a Doctor. He is the founder and editor of the magazine Creative Nonfiction, the first and largest literary journal to exclusively publish nonfiction, and has also published the essay collection Forever Fat and two books on writing, The Art of Creative Nonfiction and Keep It Real, among other titles. Gutkind currently teaches creative writing at Arizona State University’s Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes.

Dorothy Allison grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, the first child of a fifteen-year-old unwed mother who worked as a waitress. Now living in Northern California with her partner Alix and her teenage son, Wolf Michael, she describes herself as a feminist, a working-class storyteller, a Southern expatriate, a sometime poet and a happily born-again Californian. A novelist, short-story writer, and poet, Allison received mainstream recognition with her novel Bastard Out of Carolina, a finalist for the 1992 National Book Award. The novel won the Ferro Grumley prize, an ALA Award for Lesbian and Gay Writing, became a bestseller, and an award-winning movie. It has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Awarded the 2007 Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction, Allison is a member of the board of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. A novel, She Who, is forthcoming.