Alabama Yesterdays: Readings on a Desert Island

Friday, November 1, 2019

Readings on a Desert Island

This past Saturday Dianne and I journeyed to the Woodlawn neighborhood of Birmingham to hear some authors read and converse at the Desert Island Supply Company (DISCO). DISCO has been located since 2012 on First Avenue North in part of the historic Woodrow Hall building (yes, there will be a blog post soon on that!). The non-profit Desert Island program works with Birmingham-area students to develop their creative writing skills "to explore and document their worlds." Anthologies of student work are available. The venue is also available for concerts, readings and other events.

The program we attended featured a full afternoon of author readings and conversations with each other and audience members. Livingston Press at the University of West Alabama sponsored the event. Livingston has been publishing novels, short story collections and non-fiction since 1984; their list of some 140 titles includes many Alabama authors.

We arrived about 4:30 p.m., so we unfortunately missed the earlier authors. We did hear T.K. Thorne, Faith Kaiser, Loretta Cobb, William Cobb, Mike Burrell, Alina Stefanescu and our son Amos Wright. You can see a book cover image for each of them below. The venue was nice, and the format worked very well. The authors read a bit from their works, asked each other questions and took questions from the audience. Books were available for sale, and there was free food and libations.

All photos are mine unless otherwise indicated.