Alabama Village

“A ragged-edged, crystalline masterpiece: a document of our times, a meditation on the society we’ve created, and a work of testimony that will speak to readers for many years to come.”
—Jim Hicks, The Massachusetts Review

“Through moving and poignant stories of the people of Alabama Village, J. Malcolm Garcia places a spotlight on an impoverished and neglected place in the Deep South. Alabama Village urges its readers to confront the cycle of violence and lack of economic opportunity that make it impossible for the poor to create a vision of a different life. By telling the story of one place, Garcia also reminds us of the consequences of ignoring communities like this across America.”
—W. Ralph Eubanks, author of When It’s Darkness on the Delta

“In diamond-clear prose and with a fair, evenhanded sensibility not often encountered these days, Garcia reports on a forsaken corner of the South surviving below the poverty line and below the mainstream news radar: Alabama Village. Here, two gunshots are dismissed as someone testing their weapon, three or more deemed worthy of alarm. This book is at once a collection of tender character studies and an American true-horror tale, an edifying read that will leave you shaken even as you grow fonder and fonder of the characters.”
—John Brandon, author of Citrus Country

​”Lyrical, harrowing and profoundly humane, J. Malcolm Garcia’s Alabama Village reads like testimony and song.”
—Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, Lillian Smith Book Award-winning author of My Monticello

“Garcia tells the stories of these folks with compassion and honesty; his writing is textured and engrossing, emotional yet rational. The narratives of his subjects, his characters if you will, are presented with an honesty one will rarely find any more in a mainstream media source. That in itself is one fine reason to read his work.”
—Ron Jacobs, author of Daydream Sunset: The Sixties Counterculture in the Seventies

“J. Malcolm Garcia’s intimate portraits of young people struggling to survive in a rough neighborhood outside Mobile, Ala., are heartbreaking and, yet, somehow hopeful at the same time. We meet them through their connection to a church established by a Christian couple who see the good at the core of people whom society has largely written off. The community is plagued by gun violence, blight, generational poverty and addiction. Too many people don’t live to be 30. The storytelling is powerful: “Death has as much of a presence in the Village as the people living here, attaches to them like a second shadow.” — Debbie Elliott, NPR

J. Malcolm Garcia is a literary investigative reporter with a unique background in social work, having served as a social worker and director of a homeless services agency assisting unhoused individuals in San Francisco for fourteen years before transitioning to journalism in 1997.

His published works include:

• The Khaarijee: A Chronicle of Friendship and War in Kabul (2009)
• What Wars Leave Behind (2014)
• Without A Country: The Untold Story of America’s Deported Veterans (2017)
• Riding through Katrina with the Red Baron’s Ghost (2018)
• The Fruit of All My Grief: Lives in the Shadows of the American Dream (2018) (Seven Stories Press)
• Most Dangerous, Most Unmerciful: Stories from Afghanistan (2022) (Seven Stories Press)
• Out of the Rain: A Novel (2024) (Seven Stories Press)

In June 2025, Out of the Rain was longlisted for the 2025 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award.

Garcia’s writing has been featured in anthologies such as Best American Travel Writing, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and Best American Essays. He is also a recipient of the Studs Terkel Prize and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for his series on burn pits and their impact on American service members in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He is the nephew of the celebrated Puerto Rican actor Jose Ferrer, the inaugural winner of the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role as Cyrano in the film Cyrano de Bergerac. Garcia is also the grandson of Rafael Ferrer (1885-1951), an esteemed essayist and lawyer.

Garcia has been a consistent contributor to publications such as Guernica, Salon, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. He currently resides in the San Diego area.

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