Few places in America can host a book festival quite like Monroeville. At the 2024 Monroeville Literary Festival, held in late winter in the upstairs courtroom of the old Monroe County Courthouse, prize-winning authors spoke from the same room that inspired the courtroom scenes of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. For readers who made the drive, the setting alone was worth the trip, and the lineup of writers made it unforgettable.
The two-day event, held annually in the historic courtroom, brought together bestselling novelists, journalists, poets, scholars and a celebrity chef, along with award presentations honoring Truman Capote and Harper Lee, the two literary giants who grew up as childhood neighbors in this small Monroe County town.
A Festival Rooted in Decades of Southern Letters
The Monroeville Literary Festival was born in 2020, growing out of the 22-year legacy of the Alabama Writers Symposium, which began in 1998. Monroeville, long considered a mecca for Southern writers, is known as the Literary Capital of Alabama, and the festival showcases the best of the state’s distinguished writers and scholars.
Each year the festival brings bestselling authors and avid readers together for conversation, book signings, luncheons and dinners, all wrapped in the town’s Southern hospitality. The festival committee selects authors to receive awards for their work, including the Truman Capote Prize and the Harper Lee Award. In 2024, organizers added a new Special Lifetime Achievement Award.
Books by the featured authors, both current and past titles, were available for purchase in the museum store on the ground floor beneath the courtroom. The old courthouse, built in 1903, now operates as a museum dedicated to the town’s literary heritage, and its restored courtroom is one of the most recognizable rooms in Southern literature. Hearing accomplished authors speak where readers imagine Atticus Finch, Scout and the rest of Lee’s characters gives the festival an atmosphere that is hard to match anywhere else.
Kim Cross Receives the Truman Capote Prize
The award memorializing Truman Capote went to Kim Cross for her nonfiction book In Light of All Darkness. The book recounts how the FBI and police investigated and caught the man responsible for one of the most notorious true-crime cases in the United States, the 1993 kidnapping of 12-year-old Polly Klaas from her home in California. The comparison to Capote’s own landmark work of narrative nonfiction, In Cold Blood, was hard to miss.
The book took years of painstaking research and interviews. Cross gained access to firsthand accounts through her father-in-law, a former FBI investigator, which opened doors that other writers who covered the case never had. In her discussion with the audience, she described the years-long effort to piece the story together and said every word in the book is verified, with zero speculation.
Cross, a University of Alabama journalism graduate who once worked as a student intern in the dean’s office at the Culverhouse College of Commerce, has spent most of her career as a freelance writer. Her earlier book, What Stands in a Storm, is a minute-by-minute account of the tornadoes that devastated Tuscaloosa and much of Alabama on April 27, 2011. She also spent a decade at a national magazine as a writer and editor, where she was responsible for bringing author Rick Bragg to the magazine’s back page.
Now living in Boise, Idaho, with her husband and teenage son, Cross was at the time working on a nonfiction book about the plight of the wild Atlantic salmon, which faces extinction because of habitat alteration, pesticide pollution and predation by non-native fish. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Outside magazine and many other notable publications.
Tom Franklin Honored With the Harper Lee Award
The Harper Lee Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer went to Tom Franklin, who grew up about 45 minutes from Monroeville in Dickinson, Alabama. Franklin now teaches in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, another town steeped in Southern literary history as the longtime home of William Faulkner.
In a touch that made the moment especially meaningful, the award was presented to Franklin by Harper Lee’s nephew and grandniece. Franklin’s bestselling novel Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger Award.
Franklin charmed the audience with self-deprecating humor. Many of his books draw on his own life, including stories of the unglamorous jobs he worked in dirty warehouses in South Alabama. Readers lined up afterward to have books signed, and at least one fan left with a stack of titles and instructions from the author on the order in which to read them.
A Lifetime Achievement Award for the Poet Laureate of the Turkey Woods
The newly created Special Lifetime Achievement Award went to Colonel Tom Kelly, a retired forester from South Alabama and author of Tenth Legion and several other books about turkey hunting and leadership. Kelly, then 97, was unable to attend. His daughter accepted on his behalf, explaining that her father was suffering from what he calls “Calendaritis,” which in his words happens when too many pages in the calendar have turned.
The award was presented by Daniel Haas, David Hawley and Ann Bedsole, each of whom offered remarks placing Kelly in esteemed company. Along with Haas’ grandfather, Toxey Haas, founder of Haas Outdoors in West Point, Mississippi, the maker of the Mossy Oak brand, Kelly is credited by admirers with helping save America’s wild turkey through conservation efforts. Haas drew laughter when he noted that many who know Kelly consider him “Turkey Jesus.” A more reverent title often bestowed on Kelly is “Poet Laureate of the Turkey Woods.”
Bedsole, a longtime friend of Kelly, a writer in her own right as author of Leave Your Footprint, and a significant reason the Monroeville Literary Festival exists, told the audience that one day at her farm not far from Monroeville she found herself with nothing to read and reluctantly picked up Tenth Legion. “It is the best book I’ve ever read,” she said.
The day closed with a book signing by all the authors present and an evening reception featuring music by Diamond Reo 75, a reunion band of Yale graduates that included Mobile’s Bill Oppenheimer on keyboard.
Civil Rights History, Southern Grit and More on Day Two
The second morning opened in the courtroom with a presentation by Ethel Morgan Smith, winner of the 2023 Eudora Welty Prize for Path to Grace: Reimagining the Civil Rights Movement. The book is a collection of stories about people who worked behind the scenes of the movement, many of whom readers may never have heard of, including several from Alabama. It highlights the struggles within communities across the country and serves as a reminder that the road to equal rights was hard and the work is not complete. Smith, who has encountered many historic figures over her life, lives in Birmingham, where she works as a writer and scholar.
The final presentation was a question-and-answer session with chef Kelsey Barnard Clark, a Dothan native who became the fifth woman and first Southerner to win Bravo’s Top Chef, taking the title in Season 16 in 2019. She released her debut cookbook, Southern Grit: 100 Down-Home Recipes for the Modern Cook, in 2021, and in 2024 she was named a James Beard Award semifinalist for Best Chef: South. Clark operates a restaurant and catering business in Dothan, is passionate about gardening and interior design, and had recently signed a two-book deal on food and entertaining with Chronicle Books.
The festival wrapped up with lunch and a final book signing at The Shop at 66, just around the corner from the courthouse.
More Voices in the Courtroom
The lineup ran deep. Other authors on hand included:
- Robert Bailey, a Wall Street Journal bestselling author from Huntsville known for the Jason Rich series, the McMurtrie and Drake legal thrillers, the Bocephus Haynes series and the inspirational novel The Golfer’s Carol. Bailey also works as a civil defense attorney; his book Rich Waters was new at the time.
- Barbara Barcellona Smith, a California native from a large Italian family who now lives in Enterprise, Alabama. The author of Let’s Eat Snails spent the day before the festival visiting Monroeville classrooms and headlined Saturday’s family activities.
- Jennifer Horne, who served as Alabama’s 12th Poet Laureate from 2017 to 2021, introduced Odyssey of a Wandering Mind, her biography of Sara Mayfield, an early 20th-century Alabama aristocrat who lived a troubled but remarkable life among some of the literary giants of her era.
Writers Tina Mozelle Braziel and her husband, James Braziel, had to cancel their appearance after testing positive for COVID-19. Their absence was felt, but it did not dampen the enthusiasm of the crowd, and festival volunteers earned praise for being kind, courteous and helpful throughout the weekend.
Why Monroeville Draws Readers From Everywhere
Monroeville’s literary reputation rests on an extraordinary coincidence: Harper Lee and Truman Capote spent parts of their childhoods as next-door neighbors here in the 1930s. Lee later drew on the town and its people for To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, while Capote went on to write Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood. Lee is widely believed to have modeled the character Dill on her young friend.
When filmmakers adapted To Kill a Mockingbird for the 1962 movie starring Gregory Peck, they recreated the Monroe County courtroom on a Hollywood soundstage, cementing the room’s place in American culture. Today the Old Courthouse Museum welcomes visitors from around the world, and each spring local actors stage a theatrical adaptation of the novel, with the trial scene performed in the courtroom itself.
The town also celebrates its heritage with murals, sculptures of readers and other public art tied to its literary history. For visitors, a trip to Monroeville can easily combine the festival with a courthouse tour and a stroll around the historic square.
Planning a Visit
The Monroeville Literary Festival is typically held each year in late winter or early spring, with programs in the historic courtroom, signings and meals around town. Readers interested in attending a future festival should check with organizers for current dates, featured authors and ticket information, as schedules and lineups change from year to year.
A word of advice from those who have attended: bring a sturdy tote bag and a flexible budget. With so many authors signing books in one place, it is easy to leave Monroeville a little book-poor, and few readers would call that a bad thing.