Nominated for The American Book Award, Sudye Cauthen's SOUTHERN COMFORTS: Rooted in a Florida Place is only the first of several books based on her lifelong documentation of North Florida community and environment. Cauthen, who published her first poem at age 14 and began interviewing black and white descendants of early Florida pioneers as long ago as 1960, has published prize winning essays, short stories, and poetry about Florida.
Now there’s a book, its pages informed by Cauthen's examination of place--as director of the state's first Folk Arts in the Schools program, collecting oral histories in Alachua County, as planner of public programs like "Alachua Portrait" (funded by the Florida Endowment for the Humanities) and "From the Bellamy Road" (funded by Florida Progress Corporation) and her educational expertise in Southern Studies at Ole Miss where she earned a master's degree in 1993.
About the book that grew out of Cauthen's single-handed scouring-out of local lore in her home territory of Alachua County, Louise Westling, who writes about southern women writers, says "This wonderful memoir is better than a novel. Cauthen has done for Florida what no one has done before, what Faulkner and Welty did for Mississippi." Novelist Harry Crews adds, "To make history--place--beat with the pulse of blood is the most difficult of all the writer's alchemy and, when it is done well, it is the most rewarding. Sudye Cauthen has rewarded us with the eye, ear, and memory of the natural writer."
SOUTHERN COMFORTS, marketed and distributed by the University of Georgia Press, is now availabe (Click Here to buy). Meanwhile, Cauthen's working her way through boxes of field notes, completing other books--fiction and nonfiction. And in the only way she knows how, she's still saving the voices of her people through the work of the North Florida Center for Documentary Studies (NFCDS) which she founded in 1997. Recognition for her work includes a GlimmerTrain Prize for Fiction, a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature, and a Baha'i 1984 Human Rights Award.