Alice Randall (born Detroit, Michigan) is an American author and songwriter. Randall grew up in Washington, D.C.. She attended Harvard University, where she earned an honors degree in English and American literature, before moving to Nashville in 1983 to become a country songwriter.^[1] She currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee and is married to attorney David Ewing.

Country music career

Randall is the first African American woman to write a number one country hit.^[2] Over 20 of her songs have been recorded, including several top ten and top forty records; her songs have been performed by Trisha Yearwood and Mark O'Connor.

Fiction

Randall is also a novelist, whose first novel The Wind Done Gone is a reinterpretation and parody of Gone with the Wind. The Wind Done Gone is essentially the same story as Gone with the Wind, only told from the viewpoint of Scarlett O'Hara's half-sister Cynara, a mulatto slave on Scarlett's plantation. The estate of Margaret Mitchell sued Randall and her publishing company, Houghton Mifflin, on the grounds that The Wind Done Gone was too similar to Gone with the Wind, thus infringing its copyright. The lawsuit was eventually settled, allowing The Wind Done Gone to be published. The novel became a New York Times bestseller.

Randall's second novel, Pushkin and the Queen of Spades, was named as one of The Washington Posts "Best fiction of 2004."

Awards

Randall received the Free Spirit Award in 2001 and the Literature Award of Excellence from the Memphis Black Writers Conference in 2002. She was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award in 2002.

References

Novels

• The Wind Done Gone (2001)
• Pushkin and the Queen of Spades

External links

• Official site