Fifth-generation Alachua countian Sudye Cauthen’s North Florida work began with her direction (for Alachua County Schools) of Florida’s first Folk-Arts-in-the-Schools Program, Alachua County Folk Arts (1976-79). Cauthen’s intensive investigation of the City of Alachua and its surrounding communities include the Florida Humanities Council’s Alachua Portrait: The Living Heritage Project (1983-1984).  For her direction of Alachua Portrait The Baha’i Spiritual Assembly of Greater Gainesville awarded her its 1984 Human Rights Award and the City of Alachua nominated her for FHC State Humanitarian of the Year. Florida Progress Corporation partially funded the project, From the Bellamy Road: Alachua’s Beginnings (1987-1990), a collection of taped interviews with the black and white descendants of Florida pioneers. Cauthen served the Florida Humanities Council as a Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Scholar, teaching the works of MKR around the state in 1988. Her prizewinning fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have been published in the MKR Journal of Florida Literature, Florida Review, Chattahoochee Review, Devil’s Millhopper, International Quarterly, The New Press, The Southern Reader, Isle, Yalobusha Review, CrossRoads: A Southern Journal, many Florida magazines and newspapers, and in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. She is the recipient of two State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowships in Literature. Her book “Southern Comforts: Rooted in a Florida Place” won a Florida Book Award for Nonfiction and has been named to the Florida Dept. of Education’s Just Read, Florida list each year since its publication. “The Salvation of Maggie Rider: Stories from Nokofta”, a work of fiction, appeared in 2010. She is now at work on “All The Pretty Cattle”, a memoir encompassing the demise of the family farm inspired by previously unpublished oral histories.

In 1990, Cauthen traveled to Mississippi where in 1993 she earned a master’s in southern studies at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture—University of Mississippi. She has taught writing at The University of Central Florida, Florida State University, Lake City Community College, and North Florida Community College. She led the Smithsonian’s “Original Florida” Tour in 1996 and in 1998 taught “Making Florida Home” for the Florida Humanities Council at the Columbia County Library. She toured three years in the FHC Speakers Bureau. 

In 1997, Cauthen founded the North Florida Center for Documentary Studies in White Springs and, in 2002, mounted “The Healing Ground,” a traveling exhibit of oral history excerpts and photographs.