“A Plague of Bulldozers: Celestine Sibley and Suburban Sprawl,” written by assistant professor of English Dr. Molly McGehee, has recently been published in Southern Spaces, a journal about the American South.

In the article McGehee writes about the murder mysteries of Sibley, an Atlanta journalist and fiction writer, whose writing centered on the late-20^th-century urban sprawl of the Atlanta metropolitan region. The title of the article is a play on one of Sibley’s mysteries, A Plague of Kinfolks.

While she heard about Sibley growing up, McGehee became interested in learning more about her while pursuing her Ph.D. at Emory University.

“She quickly fascinated me,” McGehee said. “Here was a woman who worked as a reporter and columnist for a Southern newspaper for 58 years, really at a time when not many female journalists were doing that-- or allowed to do that.”

During her research, McGehee read Sibley’s 20 published books and many of her 10,000 Atlanta Journal-Constitution columns.

She also read “hundreds of letters written to her by fans, which were incredibly revealing of how much her writing spoke to readers and showed how truly beloved she was by hundreds of people,” according to McGehee.

McGehee teaches Composition and World Literature I and II, African American Literature, American Identities, Southern Women's Writing, and Introduction to Southern Studies. She began studying Southern literature seriously during her undergraduate days, when she had already developed an interest in the history of the South.

“I began to see the two--Southern history and Southern literature--as linked in interesting and complicated ways,” McGehee said. “I became increasingly interested in how writers made sense of the South, how they put into words their experiences in this often perplexing--but also culturally rich--area of the country.”

Read “A Plague of Bulldozers: Celestine Sibley and Suburban Sprawl.”