The Chattanooga History Center will present its Livingood Award to John Shelton Reed at 5:30pm on April 2 at the Tivoli Theater, in conjunction with the Arts and Education Council’s Conference on Southern Literature. As the award recipient, Reed will deliver the Livingood Lecture, “The Cradle of ‘Cue: Origins of America’s Favorite Slow Food.” There is no admission fee for the lecture, and attendees need not be registered for the Conference on Southern Literature.
John Shelton Reed taught for thirty-one years at the University of North Carolina, where he directed the Howard Odum Institute for Research in Social Science, and helped to found the University's Center for the Study of the American South. A founding coeditor of the quarterly, Southern Cultures, he has received many fellowships and prizes and has been president of the Southern Sociological Society and the Southern Association for Public Opinion Research. He was once a judge at the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, and in 2001, he was elected to the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
John and his wife, Dale, with whom he co-authored Holy Smoke, the inspiration for the lecture, grew up together in Kingsport, Tennessee, but have lived in Chapel Hill since 1969. They have collaborated on two daughters and four books, including 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About the South and Cornbread Nation 4: The Best of Southern Food Writing. They started work on Holy Smoke (without knowing it) in 1962, when they first tasted North Carolina barbecue.
The Livingood Award has been presented by the Chattanooga History Center every other year since 1987 for “impact on or insight into American history.” Past recipients include C. Vann Woodward, Stephen Ambrose, Jon Meacham, and Wilma Dykeman. The Award is named for Dr. James Livingood, a well-known and well-loved scholar who was a history professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and who served as Hamilton County Historian. He was a founder of the History Center, know then as the Chattanooga Regional History Museum, and the author of several books on local history. Dr. Livingood died, in his nineties, in 2005.
For more information, call 423-265-3247.
