By Howard Rambsy II
As a region, the South is the birthplace of many African American novelists. Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, James Weldon Johnson, Gayl Jones, and Ernest Gaines among many others. With its history of brutal segregation and racism, the South is the home of all kinds of troubling circumstances, poverty, and violence, which become potent ideas in the compositions of African American writers.
Jesmyn Ward, S. A. Cosby, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Attica Locke, and Angie Thomas, to name a few, constitute new generations of southern-born writers. For decades now, educators and researchers have highlighted works by Black writers from the South. Teachers regularly assign novels by Black southern novelists, and scholars have produced extensive research about fiction set in the South.