The Welcome

Hubert Creekmore (1907-1966) was an American poet and author from Water Valley, Mississippi. He is author of Personal Sun: The Early Poems of Hubert Creekmore; The Stone Ants; The Fingers of Night; The Long Reprieve and Other Poems from New Caledonia; Formula; The Chain in the Heart; Lyrics of the Middle Ages; and Daffodils Are Dangerous: The Poisonous Plants in Your Garden, among other publications. Phillip Gordon is associate professor of English and gay studies coordinator at University of Wisconsin-Platteville. He was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up just north of Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County.

A precise handling--neither clinical nor sensational--of a marital as well as a psychological theme, this offers a well-integrated novel of character as well as of emotion.-- "Kirkus Reviews" Creekmore is probing the real north Mississippi with a deliberation that Faulkner was never really interested in doing, which leads to a very direct social challenge. Didactic or not, his subsequently clear-headed condemnations of homophobia, racism, and misogyny in midcentury Mississippi are as fruitful today as they were in 1953.--Daniel Uncapher "North American Review" The Welcome is a foundational book for southern studies, southern LGBTQ history, queer history, southern literature, and LGBTQ literature.--Jaime Harker, owner of Violet Valley Bookstore and author of The Lesbian South: Southern Feminists, the Women in Print Movement, and the Queer Literary Canon Hubert Creekmore's fiction tackled religion, race, and sexuality in ways that set him apart as a white Mississippi writer. He also dreamed of a world far beyond small-town southern expectations of heteronormativity. Today, Creekmore's groundbreaking novel The Welcome can be read as his meditation on the social constraints of the South with respect to sexuality. The solemn, helpless yearning of his character Don Mason in many ways mirrors Creekmore's own desire for a more accepting and inclusive world.--W. Ralph Eubanks, author of A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through a Real and Imagined Literary Landscape With The Welcome, Hubert Creekmore has written a queer Peyton Place, full of thwarted desire, sterile marriages, suffocating small-town conformity--but amazingly, the melodrama never reaches such a pitch that we forget his characters are humans, delicately rendered, flawed, products of their time, and desperate, if only briefly, to rise above their circumstance. Set almost ninety years ago, Creekmore's novel is still relevant today.--Nick White, author of Sweet and Low and How to Survive a Summer