User:Southernrenaissance/Brian Brown

Brian Brown (born August 7, 1970) is a photographer, poet, and documentary historian from Fitzgerald,Georgia, who focuses on vernacular architecture and the folkways of his native South Georgia to bring attention to rapid changes in his region's culture and its built and natural environments. The late naturalist and author Milton N. Hopkins, was among his earliest influences, and his first published writings were notes on bird life in The Oriole, in 1986. That same year, he met and interviewed legendary Georgia author Erskine Caldwell for his high school newspaper.

His poetry was first brought to attention at Young Harris College, where in 1989 he won first and second prize in their Danforth Bearse Memorial Poetry Competition. Over the next twenty years he published work in over fifty national journals, ranging from Chiron Review, Inkwell, Roanoke Review, Ginger Hill, The Powhatan Review, Inscape, Santa Clara Review, The Broken Plate, Quercus Review, Keyhole,  Delmarva Review, Town Creek Poetry, and Snake Nation Review, among others. This culminated in his being awarded the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize in 2009. The Rosenberg Prize is one of the largest independent poetry prizes in the United States.

In the late 1990s, he served as Interpretive Specialist at the Jefferson Davis State Historic Site in Irwinville, Georgia. During this time, Brown also published numerous articles on Georgia history in regional journals. His general focus has been the Civil War, specifically the flight of the executive branch of the Confederate States of America in 1865, and his work on the subject appears in The New Georgia Encyclopedia. The University of Georgia Press will publish The Civil War in Georgia: A New Georgia Encyclopedia Companion in the fall of 2011, containing work by Brown. He has also appeared on popular shows like Georgia's Backroads, produced by Georgia Public Television, now Georgia Public Broadcasting.

Today his focus is photography and its ability to preserve places which will otherwise be completely lost to history. He set out, in 2008, to visit every county in southern Georgia, and in the process he began a massive documentary undertaking. His goal was to photograph as much of the region's vernacular architecture as possible. Inspired by fellow Southern photographer William Christenberry's images of his native Hale County, Alabama, he created the website Vanishing South Georgia. This website has brought attention to places largely ignored and unknown by the academic establishment.