After a hiatus, the Annual Songwriter Keynote returns, live at the University of South Alabama on Saturday, March 22, 2025! This special event, which will be held in the Laidlaw Performing Arts Center (Mainstage Theatre), will feature an acoustic performance by critically-acclaimed singer-songwriter James McMurtry. Local artist Abe Partridge will open, following remarks from former USA Writer-in-Residence Frye Gaillard. Admission will be free, and all attendees will receive a free vinyl copy of IMC VOLUME TWO, the latest compilation of live recordings from the IMC Concert Series. nn----nTICKET INFORMATION: Ticketing details and procedures will be announced on Monday, February 10, 2025.n----nnSPONSORS: ASK 2025 is co-sponsored by the Alabama Humanities Alliance, the USA Department of English, the Stokes Center for Creative Writing, the USA Department of Theatre and Dance, the USA College of Arts and Sciences, and the Independent Music Collective. nnJAMES McMURTRY: One of America's most celebrated songwriters, James McMurtry has ten studio albums to his credit, each an indispensable cross section of American experience. From his John Mellencamp-produced debut, Too Long in the Wasteland (1989), to his most recent release, The Horses and the Hounds (2021), McMurtry has consistently turned his formidable wit and wisdom into incisive vignettes. Novelist Stephen King calls him "the truest, fiercest songwriter of his generation." The BBC's Bob Harris deems him "the most vital lyricist in America today." The dean of American rock critics, Robert Christgau, named McMurtry's 2004 tune "We Can't Make It Here Anymore" the best song of the decade. "Much attention is paid to James McMurtry's lyrics, and rightfully so," offers The Washington Post. "He creates a novel's worth of emotion and experience in four minutes of blisteringly stark couplets."nnABE PARTRIDGE: A musician, songwriter, visual artist, and documentarian based in Mobile, Alabama, Abe Partridge is a man of many talents. He's created an award-winning podcast (Alabama Astronaut); staged a major exhibition at the Alabama Contemporary Art Center (With Signs Following); published an art book documenting his ethnographic fieldwork (With Signs Following: Portraits + Stories from the Serpent-Handling Faith); painted the cover art for one of Charlie Parr's Smithsonian Folkways releases (2021's Last of the Better Days Ahead); and released two critically-acclaimed studio albums (2019's Cotton Fields and Blood for Days and 2023's Love in the Dark). As American Songwriter rightly notes, "Abe Partridge has established himself as one of the most respected songwriters and visual folk artists in the Southeast."nnFRYE GAILLARD: An award-winning former journalist and Southern Editor at the Charlotte Observer, Frye Gaillard spent eighteen years as Writer in Residence at the University of South Alabama. He's the author of more than thirty books, including A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s (2018), Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement That Changed America (2004), and Watermelon Wine: The Spirit of Country Music (1978). His byline has appeared in The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Journal of American History, The Bitter Southerner, Oxford American, and countless other publications. A 2025 inductee into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame, Gaillard has also won The Lillian Smith Book Award, the F. Scott Fitzgerald Museum Literary Prize, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Humanitarian of the Year Award, the Alabama Governor’s Award for the Arts, the Clarence Cason Award for nonfiction, and the Eugene Current-Garcia Award for literary scholarship. nnhttps://www.facebook.com/events/1636200093965975/