Poet and non-fiction author Patrick Phillips joins co-host Marrie Stone to talk about his book, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America. Phillips shares his experiences in hometown Forsyth County, Georgia, a township that remained essentially 100 percent white throughout most of the 20th century. He also talks about the responsibility of white writers to talk about race, his research process, the factors that existed in Forsyth that made this possible, and the complicated characters that emerged from history to bring this shadowy story to light.
In the second half, novelist Whitney Terrell discusses his latest novel, The Good Lieutenant. As an embedded reporter in Iraq, Terrell tells the story of one female lieutenant and the forces and decisions that shaped the woman she became. He tackles several points of view, a complicated structure, and shares his experiences of how it all happened.
(Broadcast date: October 19, 2016)