Berna Deane South's Among the Feathered Warriors should carry a warning label. The stories and poems in this collection seduce you with their honest and elegant language and then, without warning, they go for the throat and refuse to let you go. Joyful or full of fury, wise and forgiving, or trapped in mazes of ignorance and hate, the stubborn survivors who populate South's pages always ring true.
They are as American as gooseberry pie and cockfights.
In the tradition of revolutionary Southern writers like Flannery O'Connor and transformative poets like Anne Sexton, Berna Deane South's work vibrates with impatient life.
And like no one else, South's voice opens your heart to a world we recognize as the honest shadow of our own, a world where everything is treasured but nothing is safe.
Berna Deane South has received the Harcourt, Brace, and World Fellowship for the Novel at the University of Colorado Writer's Conference, the Indiana University Foundation Scholarship for the Novel, the Indiana University Scholarship for Poetry, and the Indiana University Writer's Conference Citation for superior work in progress in the short story. She is also the recipient of the Award of Excellence - Short Story from the Festival of Missouri Women in the Arts. In 2004, South received the Delaware Division of the Arts Individual Artist Fellow in Fiction Award.
Berna Deane lives with her husband, Frank South, in Delaware, where she is finishing her novel.
Cover Art - "Fighting Cocks" Oil on canvas, by Mario Zampedroni
Author photo by Vivian Corbett