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.

Three prints from Southern Fiction are included in an exhibition of contemporary photographs and lens-based works at The Vault Gallery in the Wadsworth Auditorium at the University of West Georgia. Infinite Weight / Present Histories was curated by Hallie Ringle, the Hugh Kaul Curator of Contemporary Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art and the former Assistant Curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem. The exhibition will be on view from October 7 to November 3 with a reception on Friday, October 7 from 6-8pm. A catalog will accompany the exhibition.

Harper’s Magazine published a portfolio of images accompanied by an essay from Southern Fiction by contributing writer Honorée Fanonne Jeffer’s in their August issue: Almost Home

Salvation South published an essay by writer and former director of the Eudora Welty House, Lauren Rhoades. Lauren’s essay is one of three included in the forthcoming monograph of Southern Fiction: Tema Stauffer’s Sense of Place

Fruit Stand, Highway 441, Georgia, 2018

Four prints from SOUTHERN FICTION are included in an exhibition from May 17 – August 27 in the Bunzl Gallery at The Bascom: A Center for Visual Arts in Highlands, NC. Guest curated by Kate Anderson, Imaginary Landscapes: Stories from the American South, features narrative works that attempt to capture the myriad stories of the South by contemporary artists alongside works from the Johnson Collection and the Collection of the Black Mountain College Museum. A public reception will be held on Thursday, June 16 at 5pm.

Those who know me well know that I spent many months of the past year deeply absorbed by the search for writers with just the right knowledge and insight to contribute essays to my forthcoming book, SOUTHERN FICTION, scheduled to be released by Daylight Books in October 2022. I am so grateful and excited to collaborate with another pair of brilliant women, Casey Cep and Lauren Rhoades, on my second book of photographs. Casey Cep is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of the NYT bestseller Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee. Lauren Rhoades is a writer and the director of the Eudora Welty House & Garden, and in Casey’s words, “a thoughtful steward of Welty’s legacy.” Thank you to The New Yorker for publishing Casey’s essay, along with a selection of my images, in their Photo Booth feature: THE REAL PLACES THAT GAVE RISE TO SOUTHERN FICTIONS. It’s been my favorite publication since I learned how to read.