Conversations with Dorothy Allison

Since the publication of her groundbreaking novel, Bastard Out of Carolina , Dorothy Allison (b. 1949) has been known—along with Larry Brown and Lee Smith—as a purveyor of the working-class, contemporary South. Allison has frequently used her position, through passionate lectures and enthusiastic interviews, to give voice to issues dear to her: poverty, working-class life, domestic violence, feminism and women’s relationships, the contemporary South, and gay/lesbian life. Often called a “writer-