The University of Arkansas Press is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of Up South in the Ozarks: Dispatches from the Margins by Brooks Blevins.
As entertaining as it is enlightening, Up South in the Ozarks: Dispatches from the Margins is the rare book that appeals to general readers as much as it does to scholars of the Ozarks and other appendages of the South. This book is a collection of essays by Brooks Blevins, some previously published and others brand new. The essays explore southern history and culture, using the author’s native Ozark region as their focus. From fireworks peddlers to country store proprietors, from migrant cotton pickers to shape-note gospel singers, Blevins leaves few stones unturned in his insightful journeys through the margins of humanity. Up South in the Ozarks does not evoke the pathos and exoticism of the books authored by outsiders looking in on marginal people. Instead, Blevins’s stories of people on the backroads and side streets of flyover country provides an insider’s honest view of the past and present in an often-stereotyped American place.
Brooks Blevins is the Noel Boyd Professor of Ozarks Studies at Missouri State University. He published with the University of Illinois Press his capstone work—three volumes constituting the definitive history of the Ozarks. He is also the author or editor of ten other books, including Arkansas/Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, and Good Ol’ Boys Defined a State.
Up South in the Ozarks: Dispatches from the Margins will be published in December 2022.