River Jordan- playwright, essayist and novelist

Pattie Welek Hall is honored to interview Nashville writer River Jordan. She is a southerner with a global perspective. She began her career as a playwright and spent over ten years with the Loblolly Theatre group, where her original works were produced, including Mama Jewels: Tales from Mullet Creek, Soul, Rhythm and Blues, and Virga.

Ms. Jordan’s first novel, The Gin Girl (Livingston Press, 2003), has garnered such high praise as “This author writes with a hard bitten confidence comparable to Ernest Hemingway. And yet, in the Southern tradition of William Faulkner, she can knit together sentences that can take your breath.”

Kirkus Reviews described her second novel, The Messenger of Magnolia Street, as “a beautifully written atmospheric tale.”

Her third novel, Saints In Limbo has been painted by some of the finest fiction voices of today as “a lyrical and relentlessly beautiful book,” and “a wise, funny, joyful and deadly serious book, written with a poet’s multilayered sense of metaphor and meter and a page-turning sense of urgency.

The Miracle of Mercy Land, a novel set in 1938 along the Gulf waters of Alabama, debuted September 7, 2010 and has been painted as ‘A triumph of beauty,”

River Jordan’s first work of narrative non-fiction, Praying for Strangers, An Adventure of the Human Spirit,  was released  April 5, 2011.

Ms. Jordan teaches and speaks around the country on “The Power of Story”, and produces and hosts Clearstory Radio on WRFN, 107.1fm Nashville.

When not traveling the back roads of America, River lives with her husband Owen Hicks, and their Great Pyrennees lap dog, Titan in Nashville, Tennessee.

http://www.riverjordan.us/