Described by Kaye Gibbons as a "cross between Nora Ephron and Flannery O'Connor," Jeanne Braselton was a funny and sassy southern lady with a rich literary heritage.  To many of the visitors to Berry College's Southern Women Writers Conference, Jeanne was a true ambassador for her hometown - Rome, Georgia. The adopted daughter of a poet who was designated chief of the Cherokee Nation, Jeanne was married to the late poet Albert Braselton, who accompanied James Dickey on the river trip that became the basis for Deliverance.

Kaye Gibbons, Jeanne Braselton and Lee Smith appearing as the "Dixie Chicks" at the SC Book Festival held in February, 2003.

Before becoming a full-time author, Jeanne worked as a journalist for the Rome News-Tribune, where she won numerous Georgia Press Association awards.  Her debut novel A False Sense of Well-Being won the 2002 Georgia Author of the Year Award for First Novel. 

Her second book for Ballentine with agent Stella Connell will be released in August, 2003. The Other Side of Air is about getting over grief from the point of view of the deceased wife looking down on her earth-bound husband. 

Jeanne Braselton, 41, died in her home on March 30, 2003.

Tribute: Amanda Davis

Amanda Davis with her debut novel was marked as an author to watch and featured as such in Pages magazine (March/April, 2003).  In the 1990's, Davis made her home in New York City, and a tribute in the New York Times (March 30, 2003), her adventurous and spunky spirit are celebrated by the many friends she made there.

While on book tour in North Carolina, Amanda Davis, 32, died in a small plane crash in the west Carolina mountains on March 14, 2003.  Her father was flying the Cessna, with Amanda and her mother as passengers.

Amanda Davis was raised in Durham, North Carolina, but was living in Oakland, California, where she taught in the MFA program at Mills College. Davis was the author of Circling the Drain, a collection of short stories. Her fiction, nonfiction, and reviews have been published in Esquire, Bookforum, Black Book, McSweeney's, Poets and Writers, Story, Seventeen, and Best New American Voices 2001.

Wonder When You'll Miss Me (William Morrow) was her first novel.

A Painted House airs on CBS's Hallmark Fame of Fame

The Hallmark Hall of Fame production of A Painted House will air nationally April 27th on CBS. The world premiere of the film will be held April 14th on the Arkansas State University campus in Jonesboro. The premiere showing will be preceded by John Grisham's remarks.  Born in Jonesboro, Grisham spent his earliest years in northeast Arkansas including the Black Oak area, where the story of A Painted House is set.  A major part of the Hallmark Entertainment production was shot in Lepanto and Clarksdale, Arkansas.

John Grisham's A Painted House is inspired by his own childhood in rural Arkansas. The narrator is a farm boy named Luke Chandler, age seven, who lives in the cotton fields with his parents and grandparents in a little house that's never been painted. The Chandlers farm eighty acres that they rent, not own, and when the cotton is ready they hire a truckload of Mexicans and a family from the Ozarks to help harvest it.