This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies, in today for Terry Gross. As we celebrate Martin Luther King Day,

we're going to listen by interview with Princeton African American Studies Professor Emani Perry,

who's just received the National Book Award for Nonfiction. The National Book Foundation called

her book, South to America, an essential, surprising journey through the history, rituals,

and landscapes of the American South, and a revelatory argument for why you must understand

the South in order to understand America. Emani Perry was born in Birmingham, Alabama,

and though she moved away as a child, she always considered it her home. Perry earned a bachelor's

degree from Yale, then a law degree at Harvard, where she also got her PhD in American studies.

She's currently the Hughes Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton,

and the author of five previous books, including Looking for Lorraine, a biography of the playwright

Lorraine Hansberry, and more recently, Breathe, a letter to my sons. Her book, South to America,

comes out in paperback at the end of February. I spoke to her last January when it was published

in Hardback. Emani Perry, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you, delighted to be here.

You are, as I said, a child of the South, a native of Birmingham, now teaching in an Ivy League

institution. What made you want to take this journey into the South? Where did this come from? It has

a couple of different origin points. I mean, one, of course, is it's my home, but I have spent my life

in some ways, in exile, much of the time, in exile of the South, and I have been traveling back and

forth the majority of my life, and I've had this experience of being both an insider and also

seeing how the South is seen. From a young age, experiencing some frustration about the misperception,

as an intellectual in a scholar over time, it just became increasingly clear to me that

the misunderstanding of the South, the depiction of it as this sort of some other backwards

different place, and other regions is actually part of the way in which we mischaracterize the nation.

...