A Deeper South Author Talk with Pete Candler (Washington, DC)

Jun 14, 2024 @ 7pm | Location: Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Avenue NW Washington, D.C. 20008

Jun 14, 2024 @ 7pm
Location: Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Avenue NW Washington, D.C. 20008
Hosted by: Politics and Prose

Join us for an author talk with Pete Candler in conversation with Ralph Eubanks. Learn about how Pete's road trips through the American South led to a personal confrontation with history in his new book, A Deeper South.

In A Deeper South: The Beauty, Mystery, and Sorrow of the Southern Road, Pete Candler offers a travel narrative drawn from twenty-five years of road-tripping through the backroads of the American South. Featuring Candler's own photography, the book taps into the public imagination and the process of both remembering and forgetting that define our collective memory of place. Candler, who belongs to one of Georgia's most recognizable families, confronts the uncomfortable truths of his own ancestors' roles in the South's legacy of white supremacy with a masterful mix of authority and a humbling sense that his own journey of unforgetting and recovering has only just begun.

With the wit of a Southern storyteller and the eye of a photographer, Candler takes the reader on a journey that spans two continents, six states, and countless miles of asphalt. Along the way, we meet the "galaxy's no. 1 Elvis fan," stop to ponder roadside markers and small-town monuments, and contemplate what makes the South both distinct from, and emblematic of, the nation of which it is a part. The stories that he uncovers can only be found off the beaten path, away from the curated tourist experiences and mass culture located near the interstate exit ramp. A Deeper South is about Candler's journeys to see the South and understand it, and he invites us to ride along.

Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Pete Candler is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Bitter Southerner, Washington Post, and elsewhere. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina.

W. Ralph Eubanks is faculty fellow and writer-in-residence at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through A Real and Imagined Literary Landscape as well as two other works of nonfiction, Ever Is a Long Time and The House at the End of the Road. A writer and essayist whose work focuses on race, identity, and the American South, his writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, The American Scholar, The Georgia Review, and The New Yorker. He is a 2007 Guggenheim fellow and a 2021-2022 Harvard Radcliffe Institute fellow.

Hosted by Politics and Prose.

Learn More