Bookmark with Don Noble

Father Gregory Boyle is a Jesuit priest whose work with gang members and former gang members in Los Angeles has become a powerful model of compassion, rehabilitation, and kinship. His memoir Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion gathers stories from decades of ministry among people often written off by society, offering a deeply moving account of grace, humor, grief, and transformation.

In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble, Don Noble speaks with Father Gregory Boyle in Studio UA at the Digital Media Center on the campus of The University of Alabama. Their conversation explores Boyle's years of work in Los Angeles, the lives and voices at the heart of Tattoos on the Heart, and the radical tenderness that shapes his understanding of faith, community, and redemption. Boyle is the founder of Homeboy Industries, described as the largest gang-intervention, rehabilitation, and re-entry program in the world. A native of Los Angeles, he served as pastor of Dolores Mission Church in Boyle Heights from 1986 to 1992, at a time when the parish was located in an area with one of the city's highest concentrations of gang activity. Tattoos on the Heart, published in 2010, became a New York Times bestseller. *Bookmark with Don Noble* features conversations with writers whose work has shaped Alabama, the South, and American literature.

Tom Rickman built a long and respected career as a screenwriter, playwright, and director, bringing carefully shaped characters and deeply human stories to both film and television. He is best known for writing the screenplay for Coal Miner's Daughter, the acclaimed 1980 film about the life of country music legend Loretta Lynn, and for the made-for-television adaptation of Tuesdays with Morrie.

In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble, Don Noble speaks with Tom Rickman before a live audience on the campus of The University of Alabama, courtesy of the Blount Undergraduate Initiative. Their conversation explores Rickman's nearly four decades of screenwriting, the craft of adapting real lives for the screen, and the challenges of writing stories that are both intimate and widely resonant.

Rickman's credits include Kansas City Bomber, W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings, Hooper, Everybody's All-American, Truman, The Reagans, and The River Rat, which he wrote and directed. His screenplay for Coal Miner's Daughter earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, and his television work received Emmy nominations for Truman and The Reagans.

Bookmark with Don Noble features conversations with writers whose work has shaped Alabama, the South, and American literature.

Tito Perdue is a Southern novelist known for fierce satire, idiosyncratic prose, and a deep suspicion of modern life. Several of his novels feature Leland "Lee" Pefley, Perdue's cantankerous alter ego — a learned, combative, and often comic figure who looks upon the late 20th century with very little affection.

In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble, Don Noble speaks with Tito Perdue at the James Raymer House in Northport, Alabama. Their conversation explores Perdue's fiction, the creation of Lee Pefley, and the strange comic force of a character who seems permanently at war with the values, language, and manners of the modern world.

Perdue's first published novel, Lee, introduced Leland Pefley as an aging man returning to his native Alabama after decades away, dismayed by what he sees as the decadence of contemporary society. Across later books, Perdue returned to Pefley and his world, building a body of work that blends Southern setting, philosophical provocation, satire, and dark comedy.

Bookmark with Don Noble features conversations with writers whose work has shaped Alabama, the South, and American literature.

Stewart O'Nan is a successful and prolific writer of fiction whose novels often find drama, tenderness, and consequence in the lives of ordinary people. Before turning fully to writing, O'Nan studied aerospace engineering at Boston University and worked as a test engineer for Grumman Aerospace, later earning an MFA in fiction from Cornell University.

In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble, Don Noble speaks with Stewart O'Nan in the studio at Reese Phifer Hall on the campus of The University of Alabama. Their conversation centers on O'Nan's novel The Odds, the story of Art and Marion Fowler, a Midwestern couple facing job loss, financial ruin, and the possible end of their marriage. On Valentine's Day, they travel to a casino in Canadian Niagara Falls, hoping one turn at the roulette wheel might save both their finances and their future together.

O'Nan is the author of numerous books, including Snow Angels, A Prayer for the Dying, Last Night at the Lobster, Emily, Alone, and The Odds. His work has earned wide critical praise, including the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and recognition from Granta as one of the Best Young American Novelists. His fiction is known for its close attention to working lives, family strain, memory, loss, and the quiet pressures that shape everyday people.

Bookmark with Don Noble features conversations with writers whose work has shaped Alabama, the South, and American literature.

Roger Rosenblatt has spent decades writing with clarity, wit, and moral urgency about American life, politics, family, war, aging, grief, patriotism, and the human condition. Familiar to many public television viewers as a frequent essayist for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Rosenblatt has also written for Time, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and other major publications.

In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble, Don Noble speaks with Roger Rosenblatt at Southern Voices, the annual conference for writers and readers at the Hoover Public Library. Their conversation explores Rosenblatt's recent books on aging, materialism in America, and patriotism after 9/11, as well as the long career of a prolific essayist who has written thoughtfully and provocatively on hundreds of subjects.

Rosenblatt is the author of numerous books of essays, memoir, fiction, and drama, including Rules for Aging, Consuming Desires: Consumption, Culture, and the Pursuit of Happiness, and Where We Stand: 30 Reasons for Loving Our Country. His essays for Time won two George Polk Awards, and his television essays for PBS earned both Peabody and Emmy honors.

Bookmark with Don Noble features conversations with writers whose work has shaped Alabama, the South, and American literature.

Roger Reid has spent years helping Alabama audiences better understand the natural world as a writer, director, and producer for the award-winning public television series Discovering Alabama. In his young-adult novels Longleaf and Space, Reid brings that same love of science, nature, and discovery to fiction, combining adventure storytelling with factual information about Alabama's forests, wildlife, astronomy, and space program.

In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble, Don Noble speaks with Roger Reid at the James D. Raymer Home in Northport, Alabama. Their conversation explores Reid's work on Discovering Alabama, his interest in writing for young readers, and the creation of teenage sleuth Jason Caldwell, whose adventures unfold in real Alabama settings.

Longleaf is set in the Conecuh National Forest and introduces readers to the longleaf pine ecosystem, while Space continues Jason Caldwell's story in a mystery-adventure involving astronomy, Huntsville, and Alabama's connection to space exploration. Reid's fiction reflects his belief that science and storytelling can work together, drawing young readers into suspenseful plots while opening their eyes to the natural and scientific wonders around them.

Bookmark with Don Noble features conversations with writers whose work has shaped Alabama, the South, and American literature.

Richard Tillinghast is a poet, essayist, teacher, and travel writer whose work reflects a life shaped by Southern roots, literary mentorship, and a deep engagement with place, history, and culture. Raised in Memphis, Tennessee, Tillinghast studied at the University of the South in Sewanee before earning graduate degrees at Harvard, where he studied with the poet Robert Lowell.

In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble, Don Noble speaks with Richard Tillinghast at Pebble Hill, the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts and Humanities at Auburn University. Their conversation explores Tillinghast's poetry, his Southern upbringing, his years as a teacher and writer, and the influence of Lowell and other literary figures on his work.

Tillinghast taught at several institutions, including Harvard, UC Berkeley, Sewanee, Trinity College Dublin, and the University of Michigan, where he had a long career as a professor of English. He is the author of numerous books of poetry and nonfiction, including works that move between America, Ireland, Turkey, and the wider world. His honors include the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Bookmark with Don Noble features conversations with writers whose work has shaped Alabama, the South, and American literature.

Pat Devoto's novels belong to a rich tradition of Southern coming-of-age stories, a line that runs from Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer to Harper Lee's Scout Finch. In My Last Days as Roy Rogers and Out of the Night That Covers Me, Devoto writes about childhood, memory, race, family, and the complicated history of the South with humor, tenderness, and moral seriousness.

In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble, Don Noble speaks with Pat Devoto at Writing Today, the annual conference for writers and readers at Birmingham-Southern College. Their conversation explores Devoto's Florence, Alabama, roots; her path from public school teaching to fiction; and the ways her novels draw on the landscape, voices, and social history of northern Alabama.

Devoto was born and raised in Florence, Alabama, and graduated from the University of Tennessee with a degree in secondary education. A former high school teacher, she is the author of novels including My Last Days as Roy Rogers, Out of the Night That Covers Me, and The Summer We Got Saved. Her work is known for vivid Southern settings, memorable young narrators, and careful attention to the legacies of segregation, family, and resilience.

Bookmark with Don Noble features conversations with writers whose work has shaped Alabama, the South, and American literature.

Neil White's memoir In the Sanctuary of Outcasts tells the remarkable true story of the year he spent in a federal prison that also shared its grounds with the last leprosarium in the continental United States. At first, the premise sounds almost impossible: a prison sentence served in Carville, Louisiana, among inmates, guards, medical staff, nuns, and patients who had lived for years with Hansen's disease.

In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble, Don Noble speaks with Neil White at Jacksonville State University's literary conference. Their conversation explores the unusual and powerful subject at the center of In the Sanctuary of Outcasts, and how White turned an experience of disgrace and confinement into a memoir about humility, dignity, redemption, and the unexpected community he found at Carville.

White is a Mississippi writer, editor, publisher, and speaker. Before writing In the Sanctuary of Outcasts, he had worked as a newspaper editor, magazine publisher, and advertising executive. His memoir reflects both the eye of a journalist and the hard-won perspective of someone forced to reconsider ambition, pride, and what it means to live honestly.

Bookmark with Don Noble features conversations with writers whose work has shaped Alabama, the South, and American literature.

Michael Cunningham's acclaimed novel The Hours received both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Inspired in part by Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, the novel moves across time and consciousness, beginning with Woolf's final days in 1941 and expanding into the lives of modern women struggling with love, identity, obligation, and mortality.

In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble, Don Noble discusses Cunningham's inventive and deeply moving novel, which connects Woolf's life and work with the story of Clarissa Vaughan, a book editor living in Greenwich Village at the end of the 20th century. While readers do not need to have read Mrs. Dalloway to appreciate The Hours, Cunningham's novel is enriched by its conversation with Woolf's modernist masterpiece.

Cunningham is the author of A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours, Specimen Days, By Nightfall, and other works of fiction and nonfiction. Educated at Stanford University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he has been recognized as one of the major American novelists of his generation. The Hours was later adapted into an acclaimed film starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman.

Bookmark with Don Noble features conversations with writers whose work has shaped Alabama, the South, and American literature.