Kathryn Tucker Windham

Alabamians consider her the state’s best storyteller. Public radio listeners consider her a best friend.

They have found in her a loving companion who shares intimate, evocative memories of swimming holes, penny candy, eccentric neighbors, and lazy days spent counting buzzards and stamping gray mules.

After graduating from Huntingdon College, Kathyrn Tucker Windham became the first woman hired by the Alabama Journal in Montgomery. However, her journalism career began in her hometown of Thomasville where, as a teenager, she wrote movie reviews for her cousin Earl Tucker, the editor of the local newspaper. Though it was a small town, she lived a large life and shares its wonders through her richly textured stories and essays. And it was there, with a giveaway drugstore Brownie camera, that this accomplished photographer snapped her first pictures. Today her photos are exhibited in galleries and museums.

She served as reporter, photographer, and state editor for the Birmingham News and reporter, city editor, state editor, and associate editor for the Selma Times Journal. She promoted statewide war bond drives during WWII and was community service planner for the Area Agency on Aging in Camden, Alabama.

She had never really told stories until a surprise invitation to speak at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesboro, Tennessee. Now she is a fixture at that event and appears at numerous other festivals in the United States and abroad. Her ghost stories, which she first collected in Thirteen Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey, have been favorites for generations of schoolchildren. Her thoughtful and poignant stories about growing up and living in the South secured her an audience of all ages when she was featured on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, and her commentaries are still heard every Friday morning on Alabama Public Radio.

In her many books she has remembered the fascinating yet largely forgotten lives of the people in isolated and insular Gee’s Bend, Alabama; she’s preserved treasured family recipes and documented rich, compelling stories, legends, and folkways from Alabama’s past. In a one-woman play she rescued the legacy of Julia Tutwiler, one of Alabama’s greatest citizens and reformers.

Writing from her home in Selma, looking out upon her bottle trees, she has little interest in e-mail and cell phones, and won’t hear of plugging in an answering machine. Still, she accomplished something in her stories that cannot be duplicated by the most sophisticated machines. "I think storytelling is a way of saying ‘I love you,’ she explains.

"I love you enough to tell you something that means a great deal to me."