Rick Bragg has been and can be described as many things — best-selling author, Pulitzer Prize winner, professor, former New York Times writer.

It’s that last one that might seem to bear ire. In May 2003, Bragg resigned from his post amid controversy over his failure to give credit to an unpaid freelancer who spent four days collecting information for a story on the Florida oyster business. Bragg tagged the story with an Apalachicola dateline, though he himself had only spent a few hours in the town.

In the post-Jayson Blair furor, Bragg’s claim that “it is not unusual to send someone to conduct an interview you don’t have time to conduct” angered journalistic colleagues nationwide who denounced the practice of relying on stringers and interns, insisting they did their own work.

Bragg was suspended from the New York Times for two weeks following the incident, and planed to leave the newspaper later that year. However, in an effort to spare “hurt feelings, not my own or anyone else’s,” according to an interview with the Washington Post, Bragg submitted his resignation early.

Three years later, Bragg is a professor of writing in the journalism department at the University of Alabama — his home state. His books All Over But the Shoutin’ (1998) and Ava’s Man (2001), along with a collection of his best newspaper writing Somebody Told Me (2001), have won awards and topped best-seller lists. And the New York Times incident is ancient history.

“To be brutally honest with you, I can’t even pretend to care,” Bragg said, speaking via telephone from his UA office.

“I would do it all exactly the same.”

Born July 26, 1959, and raised on cotton farms in the rural foothills of Appalachia, Bragg — a headliner at Western Carolina University’s fourth annual Spring Literary Festival held March 27-30 — became a storyteller not so much by study as through experience. While every culture has its own storytelling traditions — from Irish

folktales to big-city stoop talkers — across Appalachia storytelling has remained a bastion for preserving oral histories, something passed down by men and women across generations.

“So telling a story was second nature, you know. Writing it down took me a while to figure out,” Bragg said.

Bragg briefly attended Jacksonville State University. The majority of his writing education, however, did not come from a classroom. While a reporter for The Birmingham News, Anniston Star, Talladega Daily Home and Jacksonville News, Bragg covered “cockfights, speed trap towns, serial killers, George Wallace, Bear Bryant, and Richard Petty,” according to Bragg’s BookBrowse biography. He moved up through the St. Petersburg Times and Los Angeles Times before signing on at the New York Times, first on the metro desk. It was two months spent covering violence in Haiti that got him promoted to the national desk, giving him the widespread freedom to cover stories — not just news — all across America.

When Bragg won the Pulitzer in 1996 for feature writing, he brought his mother, Margaret, to New York for the ceremony. She had never been to the city, never been on an airplane, never ridden on an escalator, and hadn’t bought a dress for herself in 18 years. It was she who would become the focus of his first book.

“I’d always known the story of my mother was powerful, and while not unique among the women she grew up with it was special and powerful,” Bragg said. “And so you know I just always kind of knew that would be the first thing I’d write if given the power to do a non-fiction work. I was just lucky that people cleaved to it.”

The story was hailed for its portrayal of the South.

“A grand memoir ... [Bragg] tells about the South with such power and bone-naked love ... that he will make you cry,” read the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s review.

Bragg continued the familial introspection with Ava’s Man, another memoir, this time about the grandfather he never knew — a moonshiner, unable to read, constantly on the move to keep his family ahead of the Great Depression’s ravages.

“There was no burning desire in me to tell his story,” Bragg said. “It was just fun to do.”

Writing about family, seems to have struck a chord. Bragg’s upcoming book focuses on his father — again a man he never knew well. His father ran off when Bragg was 6. He didn’t show up again until he was near death, when Bragg was in high school.

“It’s just about my dad as a boy before he drank himself to death, before the liquor got him, about who he was growing up in the mill village,” Bragg said, his voice slightly softened. “He grew up two-fisted and fightin’ and playing and just loving being alive. Somewhere that vanished.”

Through interviews with friends and cousins, Bragg has pieced together a picture of a man who carried a fire. He won over his wife, Bragg’s mother, Margaret, while she was out on a date with another man. Bragg’s father loaned the couple the car, but decided he’d like to come along. It was from the back seat he leaned in and whispered, “You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

Sharing these personal stories is a double-edged sword. Bragg isn’t looking to write an angry novel exposing his father’s flaws, but choosing to look beyond them also bears consequence.

“I suspect I’m going to hurt someone’s feelings,” Bragg said.

“People sometimes react as though they touched something hot at the idea of it, but when they see it, it’s not nearly the agony,” Bragg said of opening family coffins. “You uncover the value that’s there and you honor the people in (the book).”