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From FIRST DRAFT: Journal of the Alabama Writers' Forum, Spring Issue

THE MONTGOMERY - SAN MIGUEL EXPRESS
Wayne Greenhaw Wins 2006 Harper Lee Award
by Danny Gamble

Wayne Greenhaw received the news of his nomination for this year’s Harper Lee Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer at his second home in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico.

“I was sitting in my tiny oficina high above San Miguel,” he said from his home there. “I was working, writing a treatment for a film of The Thunder of Angels, when I retrieved an e-mail from Jeanie Thompson.”

Thompson, Executive Editor of the Alabama Writers’ Forum, had emailed Greenhaw to inform him of his award. Greenhaw returned Thompson’s email and then immediately phoned Harper Lee, an old friend.

“At first she kidded, asking if I would truly accept an award with her name on it,” said Greenhaw. “When I told Nelle I would cherish the award, I could hear her smiling on the other end.

“Nelle then said, ‘Hey, kid, I’ve always loved what you have done with your work.’”

The Harper Lee Award is an annual award, established in 1998, that recognizes the lifetime achievement of a writer who was born in Alabama or spent his or her formative years living and writing in the state. The award is named for Harper Lee, whose novel To Kill a Mockingbird has sold more than thirty million copies. It is funded by George Landegger through a generous gift to Alabama Southern Community College.

In his letter of nomination, Don Noble, University of Alabama Professor Emeritus of English and host of the Alabama Public Television literary talk show Bookmark, wrote, “We have a writer here with very good work and lots of it. Wayne Greenhaw has spent his life studying and writing first-class fiction and non-fiction about the state of Alabama. There is no one in the state who deserves this award more.”

Greenhaw has published eighteen books, several short stories, numerous journalism pieces, and two plays. He has also written for film and television.
Born in Sheffield in 1940, Greenhaw grew up in Trussville and Tuscaloosa, where he attended the University of Alabama. There he studied with noted creative writing teacher Hudson Strode. Greenhaw began his writing career early.

“Since I was a teenager I have awakened around 5:30 or 6 and started writing,” he said. “I actually wrote a first novel before I finished high school. Thank goodness that manuscript has been lost and hopefully destroyed.”
Greenhaw’s latest book, The Thunder of Angels: The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the People Who Broke the Back of Jim Crow, has won critical accolades. Greenhaw wrote the book in collaboration with Donnie Williams, a Montgomery grocer who had never attempted a book-length work.

“The publisher wanted me to collaborate with someone from the North,” said Williams, “but I insisted that I needed someone from the South that would understand me and my work. Wayne was recommended by a friend of mine.

“Once I contacted Wayne, he said all that was written about the boycott was already written, but I convinced him to look at my documents. I’m happy for Wayne winning the Harper Lee Award. He has worked very hard, and he knows how to make words come together like no other author I have ever read.”

The annual Harper Lee Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer recognizes work in fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry. In addition to his work in most of these genres, Greenhaw also spent a career as a journalist and editor.

“I am glad to be able to write -- period,” he said. “I love to jump from genre to genre, keeping my interest at a high pitch. I love to research, interview, find new and interesting facts and points-of-view, as well as people and places.

“With fiction you use an entirely different mindset. With nonfiction I work hard trying to make the real even more real and to highlight the drama of real events.”

Having spent a lifetime living and working in Alabama, Greenhaw and his wife Sally, a retired circuit court judge, now divide their time between their home in the Old Cloverdale neighborhood in Montgomery and their home in San Miguel.

“I first came here by train when I was eighteen, right out of high school, to attend the creative writing center at the Instituto Allende, which at that time was a very well-regarded school. I came back for three summers, had some marvelous adventures here, fell in love, enjoyed the old frontier atmosphere of that time nearly fifty years ago.

“After Sally retired four years ago, we rented a house in San Miguel for a month. We both fell in love with San Miguel and a few months later came back and bought a house here.”

Greenhaw spends about six months a year working in San Miguel. He described an idyllic life there.

“I have a little cubicle where I keep my laptop, some books, and other research work,” he said. “My window looks out over the beautiful old Spanish colonial town.

“You should see the town right now from the window of my oficina. It’s bathed in the last light of day -- a golden yellow. Absolutely gorgeous. The mountains far to the west turn a hazy purple at sundown. It really is beautiful.”

Despite this setting in the highlands of central Mexico, Greenhaw is not ready to accept the label of expatriate.

“Alabama is home,” he said. “I feel a strong kinship to Mexico, but Alabama is where I feel a very strong sense of being myself.”

At sixty-six, Greenhaw said that age has moderated his work schedule a bit, but that he has no plans to retire from his laptop.

"I've written the Mexican memoir," he said. "I'm sure it will need at least one more rewrite. Then Donnie and I will talk about doing a sequel to Thunder, which has already sold through two printings. I still love the act of writing and rewriting and rewriting again."

Danny Gamble is a teaching writer for "Writing Our Stories: An Anti-violence Creative Writing Program," a collaborative project of the Alabama Writers' Forum and the Alabama Department of Youth Services.