What’s next from some of the most exciting voices in Southern lit? Our annual Southern Summer Reads is here for 2025, and this year’s curated list features ten must-read titles: poetry collections short stories, and novels that speak to the region and our place within it.
Trauma often silences us in ways we don’t realize until years later. For author Kionna Walker LeMalle, Hurricane Katrina not only destroyed her home but also erased her memories, including her 30th birthday. In this conversation about her debut novel Behind the Waterline, Kionna reflects on how writing the story became an unexpected path to healing.
With a gift for writing stories and poetry set to the backdrop of historical events, Kionna Walker LeMalle celebrates the spring release of her debut novel, “Behind the Waterline,” winner of the Lee Smith Novel Prize. The award recognizes and publishes literary novels by authors from the southern United States.
A graduate of HCU’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program, LeMalle’s novel is a unique blend of historical fiction and magical realism as she raises the curtain on the lives of a teenager and his eccentric grandmother who, on the eve of Hurricane Katrina, decide to ride out the approaching storm in his second-floor bedroom. In a dream, a hallucination or…
As an author, empathy is critical to my creative work. To write fiction well, I have to get outside of myself and enter both the heart and head spaces of characters who are nothing like me. That requires understanding and even validating characters’ emotions, even when they are unlike my own. Effective narrative bends towards its characters–not just towards their habits and dialect, but also towards their world view, as well as their historical experiences and traumas…
I’d much rather be stuck in the elevator with the author who created the character. So I’d say Toni Morrison. She had a knack for deep internalization of a diverse palette of characters over the years, including some extremely vile characters. She’s spoken on this before, but I’d like to ask her if she ever felt afraid of being judged by those who just don’t get it, who don’t understand the fiction writer’s task is to be true and authentic to both the beauty and the evil of the world.
Kionna Walker LeMalle transports us to New Orleans in Behind the Waterline to show us how floodwaters don’t just expose the pipes and studs inside of walls — they can expose family secrets, too. This winner of the Lee Smith Novel Prize brings us through the historic storm, from a pre-Katrina New Orleans to a city in recovery. But its exploration of racism, the Civil Rights movement, found families, and coming-of-age, all with a touch of magical realism, make it a story with depth greater than the highest water line.
HCU Alumna Kionna Walker LeMalle met with unexpected opposition when she entered a writing contest in middle school and found herself embroiled in controversy when judges questioned the authenticity of her submission. Kionna defended her work, with the support of her teacher and mother, and was cleared of the allegations and went on to win first place in the contest.
Drum roll, please! Blair is proud to announce the winner of the Lee Smith Novel Prize is Behind the Waterline by Kionna Walker LeMalle. LeMalle’s manuscript was selected by contest judge Deesha Philyaw (The Secret Lives of Church Ladies) from over five hundred novel submissions.
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