Bookmark with Don Noble: Neil White (2010)

Neil White’s memoir In the Sanctuary of Outcasts tells the remarkable true story of the year he spent in a federal prison that also shared its grounds with the last leprosarium in the continental United States. Sent to Carville, Louisiana, after a conviction for bank fraud and check kiting, White found himself living among inmates, nuns, medical staff, and patients who had been isolated for years because of Hansen’s disease. In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble, Don Noble speaks with Neil White at Jacksonville State University’s annual literary conference On the Brink. Their conversation explores the strange and powerful subject at the center of In the Sanctuary of Outcasts, and how White turned an experience of disgrace, confinement, and separation into a memoir about humility, human dignity, redemption, and the unexpected community he found in Carville. White is a Mississippi writer, editor, publisher, and speaker. His work has included journalism, essays, plays, memoir, and publishing, and In the Sanctuary of Outcasts established him as a distinctive Southern nonfiction voice with a story unlike almost any other in contemporary memoir. Bookmark with Don Noble features conversations with writers whose work has shaped Alabama, the South, and American literature.