Southern Fiction is on view at the Baldwin Photographic Gallery at Middle Tennessee State University from March 10 – April 23. A conversation with Tema Staufffer and Lauren Rhoades will take place on Friday, March 31 at 6pm, followed by a reception for the exhibition. Lauren Rhoades is a writer based in Jackson, the former director of the Eudora Welty House & Garden, and the founder and editor-in-chief of Rooted Magazine, an online publication dedicated to telling unfiltered stories about what it means to call Mississippi home.

A conversation with Matt Sawyer about road trips in the Deep South, artistic influences and creative paths, serendipity and human connection, rivers and rural churches, Eudora Welty and Medgar Evers, and writers Casey Cep, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, and Lauren Rhoades is a Story Made Podcast.

Interview featured in the KnoxvilleVoyager: Life & Work with Tema Stauffer 

A solo exhibition of 25 large-scale prints from Southern Fiction is currently on view at East Tennessee State University’s Reece Museum through March 1. The reception and artist talk will take place on Thursday, February 2 from 5-7pm.

Southern Fiction is listed as one of 7 display-worthy books ideal for gift-giving by Suzanne Van Atten for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The Luupe included Southern Fiction in a round up of “Fifty-Seven Photography Books That Made Us See Differently in 2022”: Best Photobooks of 2022

Bill Shapiro features Southern Fiction along with books by Elaine Mayes, Ernst Haas, Gordon Parks, Saul Leiter, Bill Willoughby, Mitch Epstein, and Leah Frances: Our Favorite Photo Books of Fall 2022 

Lauren Rhoades talks with Tema Stauffer, a photographer whose work examines the social, economic, and cultural landscapes of American spaces. Tema’s new series of photographs, SOUTHERN FICTION, explores the settings that shaped the literary imaginations of 20th-century Southern writers, including Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, and Richard Wright. A monograph of SOUTHERN FICTION will be released by Daylight Books this month. The conversation is available as a podcast: The Mississippi Art Hour |Tema Stauffer 

Contributing writer Lauren Rhoades and I will be in conversation about Southern Fiction on the front lawn of the Eudora Welty House on Saturday, October 8 from 4-6pm. Lauren Rhoades is a writer and the director of grants at the Mississippi Arts Commission. Formerly, she served as director of the Eudora Welty House & Garden, a National Historic Landmark and literary house museum in Jackson. Her fiction, essays, and book reviews have been published in the Southwest Review, phoebe, StorySouth, the Mississippi Books Page, Eudora Welty Review, and elsewhere. Lauren received an MFA in creative writing from the Mississippi University for Women. She is currently at work on a memoir-in-essays.

Writer Kathryn Savage will join me at Lemuria Books in Jackson, Mississippi on Friday, October 7 at 5pm to sign and discuss our books, Southern Fiction and Groundglass. Kathryn Savage’s writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, Ecotone Magazine, the Virginia Quarterly Review, BOMB, and the anthology Rewilding: Poems for the Environment. Recipient of the Academy of American Poets James Wright Prize, she has received support from fellowships and residencies including the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Minnesota State Arts Board, Ucross Foundation, and Tulsa Artist Fellowship. She lives with her family in Minneapolis and teaches creative writing at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.