Ogden Museum Presents Southern Storytellers

Ogden Museum of Southern Art presents authors Julia Reed and Brad Watson

Critically lauded, internationally renowned Southern writers Julia Reed and Brad Watson will make a very special appearance together in a reading on Sunday, June 22. Two of the South's most gifted, engaging and humorous authors, Reed and Watson will read from 2-4pm at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art with a book signing following.  

Julia Reed, born in Greenville, Mississippi, is a New Orleanian and Contributing Editor to both Newsweek and Vogue.  She also writes for the New York Times and has been a passionate advocate for New Orleans as a frequent correspondent to CNN and MSNBC.  Random House published her first collection of work, Queen of the Turtle Derby and Other Southern Phenomena in 2004. This summer marks a very important point in her career as she has two books about to be released. The House on First Street, My New Orleans Story (Harper Collins/Ecco Press 2008) will be released later this month. Additionally a collection of her food pieces originally written for the New York Times Magazine, Ham Biscuits, Hostess Gowns, and Other Southern Delicacies: An Entertaining Life (With Recipes) is being published by July by St. Martin's Press.  

Brad Watson, a guest in our city but no stranger to the South or to international acclaim, was born in Meridian, Mississippi.  Joining us from the University of Wyoming where he teaches, Watson is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and former professor at Alabama, Ole Miss, and Harvard.  He is the author of Last Days of the Dog-Men (Norton, 1996) which received the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters as well as the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award, and a brilliant novel, The Heaven of Mercury (Norton, 2002), which received the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award, and was a finalist for the 2002 National Book Award in Fiction.  This presentation is sponsored in part by funding from Poets & Writer's, Inc. and the Kohlmeyer Circle of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.  

For information, please contact Sue Strachan, Director of Public Relations for the Ogden Museum, located at 925 Camp Street off Lee Circle.  Phone: (504) 539-9613. Email: sstrachan@ogdenmuseum.org.