Louise Shivers

Georgia Connections

• Augusta, Richmond County

Notes of Interest

Louise Shivers. writer-in-residence at Augusta State University for 25 years, is the author of two acclaimed novels who has also published articles/stories in many magazines including Redbook, Southern Living and Family Circle. She has written an unpublished memoir and is at work on a novel set in the Civil War era.

Louise S. Shivers was born August 15, 1929, in Stantonburg, NC and educated in public schools in Wilson, NC. She attended Meredith College in Raleigh, NC, Atlantic Christian College in Wilson and Augusta College in Augusta, GA. She also studied independently with poet James Dickey and novelist/essayist Reynolds Price. She has taught creative writing at the University of Florida and Augusta State University and a numerous writers workshops in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. She was named writer-in-residence at Augusta College (now Augusta State University) in 1984.

Her first novel, "Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail," was published in 1983 and was named Best First Novel of the Year by USA Today. Set in the North Carolina tobacco country of the late 1930s, it is a powerful novel of loneliness and infidelity. It won high praise from critics who called it "brilliant" and was adapted for a feature film in 1987 titled "Summer Heat." In 2006, it was adapted for the stage by playwright Jayetta Slawson. Shivers' second novel, "A Whistling Woman," set in North Carolina in the post-Civil War era, appeared in 1993 and won for Shivers a Georgia Author of the Year Award.