Mississippi

Natasha Trethewey won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her book Native Guard. Her parents had an interracial marriage while it was still illegal in Mississippi, and Tretheway's poetry often draws on her childhood as a biracial child in the south.

Fresh Air film critic John Power reviews the movie version of John Grisham's novel, "A Time To Kill."

Book critic John Leonard says Barry Hannah's southern, hard-drinking life echoes that of William Faulkner. Hannah's novel Boomerang also evokes the author's sometimes scary, creeping spirit.

Myrlie Evers' book about her late husband, the civil rights activist Medgar Evers, was recently adapted into a movie for public television. She talks about her upbringing in the South, her relationship with Evers, and her own work to advance African American civil rights.