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Welcome to Alabama Authors of the 19th and 20th Centuries, a vibrant academic website curated by Dr. Beverley Park Rilett and a team of passionate student research assistants at Auburn University in Alabama, including Jewel Odom, Emmy Brown, Samantha Simmons, Yue Cui, Libo Sun and Amber Davis. Meet our Project Team.
To help you discover Alabama's literary heritage, our digital archive project showcases renowned authors connected to Alabama, along with a directory of the books they published. Browse their portraits, biographical sketches, publication details, book jacket images, and an interactive literary map highlighting the places they once called home.
The first phase of our project launched on January 1, 2024, with detailed information on 150 esteemed Alabama authors and their books; one year later, we had 250 authors and 1830 books. Our plan for the next two years will be to expand our collection to include more than 1,000 additional writers and their publication information, with biographies, portraits, and book jackets.
In 2026 we began to explore the option of digitizing and making available a collection of over 300 cookbooks published by churches, women's clubs, schools, and civic societies across Alabama, many of them Black churches and community groups, who printed them locally to raise money for their communities. Donated to Auburn Special Collections by Birmingham collector Patrick Cather, these cookbooks will become a searchable dataset of recipes, ingredients, contributors, and places, freely available here alongside the authors and books already on the site.
We are already working on new interactive data visualization tools and features to enhance the user experience, so you'll want to return often. For now, check out our literary map, author chronology, sunburst timeline, and a decade-by-decade publication heatmap, which we added to the site in 2025.
We would like to express our gratitude to the diligent researchers behind the following websites that inspired our own digital archive project, especially Dr. Midge Coates, who granted us permission to adapt her original author descriptions.
- Encyclopedia of Alabama (a longstanding and ever-growing digital archive published by Auburn University)
- This Goodly Land (a project created by Jay LaMar and digital scholarship librarian Dr. Midge Coates, with their team of research assistants at Auburn University Libraries, 2005-2010).
- University of Alabama Libraries’ Alabama Authors (a comprehensive list originally compiled by the Alabama Library Association's Bibliographic Committee and later the Alabama Center for the Book).
If you have comments or questions, please direct them to Dr. Beverley Park Rilett at BRilett2@Auburn.edu.