Alice Randall is the author of The Wind Done Gone and Pushkin and the Queen of Spades. Born in Detroit she grew up in Washington, D.C.. As a Harvard undergraduate majoring in English she studied with Julia Child as well as Harry Levin, Alan Heimert, and Nathan Huggins. After graduation Randall headed south to Music City where she founded Midsummer Music with the idea she would create a new way to fund novel writing and a community of powerful storytellers . On her way to The Wind Done Gone she became the first black woman in history to write a number one country song; wrote a video of the year; worked on multiple Johnny Cash videos’ and wrote and produced the pilot for a primetime drama about ex-wives of country stars that was aired on CBS. She also wrote with or published some of the greatest songwriters of the era including Steve Earle, Matraca Berg, Bobby Braddock, and Mark Sanders. Two novels later the award winning songwriter with over twenty recorded songs to her credit and frequent contributor to Elle magazine is Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University. She teaches courses on Country Lyric in American Culture, Creative Writing, and Soul Food as text and in text. Randall lives near the University with her husband, a ninth generation k, who practices green law. Her daughter is a student at Harvard. After twenty-one years hard at it Randall has come to the conclusion motherhood is the most creative calling of all.

Abel Jones Jr., a civil rights lawyer’s son turned black Washington neo-con, has met an unlikely end: collapsing at the Rebel Yell dinner theater, surrounded by actors in Confederate regalia, with his white second wife at his side. Hope Jones Blackshear, Abel’s first wife and mother of his only son, is left confounded by the turn his life took in his later years.

Sharing a drink after the funeral with Abel’s old friend Nicholas Gordon, Hope lets herself reminisce about first meeting Abel at Harvard, and their early married days as a foreign service couple in Manila and Martinique. But her own version of history is altered by that of Nicholas, a dandified Brit who seems to know more than he lets on. To fully understand the story of Abel Jones, for her own sake and that of their teenage son, Hope journeys from Nashville to Rome, seeking the connection between the Abel she loved, a child of Southern terror in the sixties, and the Abel who became a White House watchdog of global terror, driven to measures Hope could never have imagined.

The work of one of our gutsiest writers, Rebel Yell is a novel of resilient love, political intrigue, and family secrets, steeped in our country’s racial history and framing our unique political moment.

Rebel Yell is a powerful and compelling novel about racial and regional identity, about marriage and about the ways in which the social and cultural upheavals of the sixties continue to reverberate through the American subconscious. -- Jay McInerney Bright Lights, Big City; Last of the Savages; How it Ended.

Alice Randall has given us Hope. And Hope helps us understand that black and white, more than a definition of contrasting colors, and more than a means of identifying two races, is the sum of our dark past, our glowing present and our bright future. --John Seigenthaler, Founder the First Amendment Center

Alice Randall has written a powerful 21^st- century novel of mourning.  Brimming with history from the tumultuous Kennedy era and Civil Rights Movement to the present global moment, REBEL YELL mourns extensive losses, not just of bodies– those who died or of those who survived and at what costs– but primarily of idealism and activism for love and justice whether in racial, marital, political, or social relations.  Writing with razor-smart humor to puncture the sadness and mystery at the center, Randall delivers up an exquisite meditation on physical and psychological lives lived and lost in arenas often considered beyond black people, whether in emotional feeling or in material fact.  Both a political novel of intrigue in the Foreign Service and its residue in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib and a protest novel against the violence done from Little Rock to Birmingham and its legacy in America’s black elite, REBEL YELL moves with conviction and courage through the complex world that was to the unresolved world that is still becoming.  -- Thadious M. Davis, Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Women’s Life Unveiled, and Games of Property: Law, Race, Gender, and Faulkner’s Go Down Moses.

With Rebel Yell, Alice Randall proves herself to be one of the bravest and insightful writers of her generation.  This is a novel of ideas-- brimming with high concepts and complicated philiophical questions.  At the same time, it is a novel full of heart.  It's about love gone right, and love gone wrong.  It's also a history of a family as well as a history of a people and the history of a nation.  This novel itself if the yell of a rebel-- Alice Randall-- as she once again claws at the shell of our dearest-held myths and shows the world what's inside. -- Tayari Jones,  Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling

Absolutely fascinating! Alice Randall weaves history and family, race and love. Tracing the life and death of Abel Jones, a modern-day black Confederate, she shows the proudest of times could wound even the prince of the Negroes. Her tale could only be written right now. --Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People

This elegant monument to our national past bears a viaticum for our future: allusive and funny, tender and elegiac, celebratory and loving all at once, Rebel Yell performs a capable act of imagination that reconciles fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, black and white, region and world, the living and their dead in a grand harmonic register; it strikes a new lyric for the American novel! --Hortense Spillers Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture

“With Rebel Yell, we enter the world of a cosmopolitan black elite, halfway between the characters of Stephen Carter’s old Gold Coast families of DC and Dorothy West's of Martha's Vineyard, anchored with stirrings of Toni Morrison’s Love. Randall’s characters hail from old Nashville with its rich civil rights history and social clubs. Weaved into this complicated world of politics, race and class, is a tale of love, hope, and redemption.  Alice Randall is a southern writer with an international trajectory and this novel confirms her place at the forefront of African American novelists.” --T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, The Speech

AWARDS, A SELECTION:

Silver Circle, 2008. Inducted (along with 10 others including Reba McIntire and Lyle Lovett) into ASCAP’s Silver Circle. Ryman Auditorium.

ASCAP #1 Club Award, for "XXX's and 000's (An American Girl)" on the Billboard Hot Country Singles Chart and the Radio & Records National Airplay Chart. 1994.

"BWC 2002 Literary Award" from Memphis Black Writers Conference and Southern Film Festival.

Hurston/Wright Legacy Award — Short list. 2002.

2004 Myers Outstanding Book Awards — Honorable Mention (Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights), for Pushkin and the Queen of Spades.

NAACP Image Award — Finalist. 2002.   

Neuharth Free Spirit Award, 2001.

"Outstanding Fiction" Award from The 1st Annual Mixed Media Watch Image Awards for

Pushkin and the Queen of Spades.