Sue Brannan Walker graduated with a B.S. in education from The University of Alabama in 1961, traveling to Foley to begin her education career teaching high school English for a year. She later attended Tulane University, where she earned her M.Ed. in 1967, M.A. in 1969, and Ph.D. in English in 1979. As a teaching assistant at Tulane, she taught freshman English at Newcomb College and also received a research grant from Tulane to study the Carson McCullers Collection at the University of Texas.
Walker returned to south Alabama in 1979 to be closer to her parents, and in 1980 she worked as an editor for the regional magazine Alabama Sun in Mobile. That same year, she also worked as an assistant professor in the English department at the University of South Alabama, where she taught for 35 years. In 1981, Walker founded the international literary journal Negative Capability, of which she also was publisher and editor. The journal evolved into Negative Capability Press, and the publishing house remains prominent and produces renowned books with an emphasis in poetry. Writer’s Digest recognized her work as editor and publisher of Negative Capability in the 1990s and declared the literary journal as the third-most prestigious in the U.S.
Walker’s love of literature started at a young age – her mother introduced her to poetry while she was recuperating from surgery as a child. She went on to be the editor of her high school newspaper. Over the years, she has authored 13 books and is featured in more than 100 academic papers, poetry, and fiction publications. Some of those works include “In the Realm of Rivers: Alabama’s Mobile-Tensaw Delta” published in early 2004; “Faulkner Suite,” a collection of poems about William Faulker in 2008; and “Whatever Remembers Us: An Anthology of Alabama Poetry,” which was a Southern Booksellers Best Poetry Book finalist in 2007. She has also published anthologies on Richard Eberhart, Marge Piercy, and Karl Shapiro as well as articles on Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor. Walker also penned “Life on the Line: Selections on Words and Healing,” published in 1992 and was awarded the William Crawford Gorgas Award by the Alabama Medical Association for her significant service in healthcare work across the state. She continues to publish in the field of Medical Humanities.
Throughout her career, Walker has received numerous awards and recognition for her achievements. Some of these accomplishments include earning an Alabama Council on the Arts Individual Writers Fellowship, being named the 10th Poet Laureate of Alabama in 2003 until 2012, and being selected for the Mobile YWCA Woman of Achievement Award as well as the Mobile Arts Council Award for Lifetime Achievement. Her many honors include the Hackney Literary Award for fiction, the Book of the Century Award by the Alabama State Poetry Society for “Life on the Line: Selections on Words and Healing,” the Elizabeth Gould Research Award for a biographical drama on the life of Madame Octavia Le Vert, the Adele Mellen Prize for distinguished contribution to scholarship, the Eugene Current-Garcia Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Literary Scholar from the Association of College Teachers of Alabama, the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum Association’s Teaching Excellence Award for her contributions at the University of South Alabama as well as a Pulitzer Prize nomination for her 2002 book “Blood Must Bear Your Name.” She was selected as the First Lady of Mobile in 2006 and was commemorated by her hometown of Foley when they proclaimed Feb. 5 to be Sue Walker Day.
She is not only a critically acclaimed poet, author, and editor but a playwright, professor, and a scholar. Walker is the Stokes Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama where she also teaches ecology and Southern literature courses. She acted as the university’s English department chair from 1998-2008. Walker has served as president of the Alabama State Poetry Society as well as state president of the Alabama National League of Pen Women and the Pensters. She served on the University of South Alabama Medical Admissions Committee and been chair of the Disabilities Committee for the National Modern Language Association. Walker serves on the Board of the Historic Blakeley State Park, where she is a regular contributor to the Blakeley Blog. She is a member of the Boards of the Alabama Writers Forum, the Alabama Writers Cooperative, and teaches a weekly creative writing class called “Writers in Nature” at the Mobile Botanical Gardens, where she has been a volunteer for the past six years.
Walker is currently completing a critical book on James Dickey and Deep Ecology as well as a novel about the Montgomery yellow fever epidemic in 1878. Walker is also working on a manuscript related to the craft of poetry.