LIVE: An Evening with Rick Bragg
Tue Apr 9, 7:30 PM - Tue Apr 9, 9:30 PM

Perhaps one of the most well-loved, warm, and inviting voices of the South, Rick Bragg – author of the 1998 New York Times Notable Book of the Year All Over But the Shoutin’ – is known for his intimate, poignant memoirs about his family in Alabama. Join Tampa Theatre and Oxford Exchange on April 9 for an evening with Bragg, as he discusses his recent book, The Best Cook in the World, a collection that USA Today’s David Holahan calls a “wonderful, rollicking, poignant, sometimes hilarious tales about how generations of Bragg’s extended family survived from one meal to the next.”

Born in Piedmont, Alabama in 1959, Bragg became a domestic correspondent in The New York Times’s Atlanta office in 1994. Before joining The Times, he worked at several newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times and our own local St. Petersburg Times. He has covered murders and unrest in Haiti, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Jonesboro, Arkansas, killings (1998), and the Susan Smith trial, and he became The New York Times’s Miami bureau chief just in time for Elián González’s arrival in late 1999 and the international controversy surrounding the Cuban boy.

Bragg attended Harvard University as a Nieman Fellow from 1992 to 1993 (“the only real college I ever had,” he says), and can also be recognized for his work inThe New York Times, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. He is also the recipient of the American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award, and 31 other national, regional, and state writing awards. He has had stories included in Best Newspaper Writing 1991, Best of the Press 1988, and two journalism textbooks on good writing and foreign reporting.

Currently, he teaches writing at the University of Alabama and pens and monthly column for Southern Living magazine.