Savannah Book Festival

Caroline Aiken’s performances are known for emanating a high level of infectious energy and jaw dropping guitar playing.   Her genre spans many styles: rock/blues/folk/country to southern roots. She is not only an accomplished singer/songwriter but also a respected musician who can cut it up on a 12-string guitar and woo the crowds with her piano ballads.  She has recorded and shared stages with The Indigo Girls and Bonnie Raitt in venues such as San Antonio’s Majestic Theater, Denver’s Red Rocks, and Berkeley’s Greek Theater. She has won many awards and accolades for her songwriting and guitar playing, including being the first woman ever invited to teach at the Stuttgart Guitar Seminar.  Caroline was selected by the Georgia Music Hall of Fame to appear in national television spots promoting Georgia music.  Caroline Aiken’s appearance is presented in collaboration with the Friends of Johnny Mercer and the Mercer Centennial Committee.

Sponsored by Dr. and Mrs. William Harris

Mary Kay Andrews started her professional journalism career in Savannah, Georgia, where she covered the real-life murder trials that were the basis of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. A former reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, she wrote ten critically acclaimed mysteries, including the Callahan Garrity mystery series, under her “real” name, which is Kathy Hogan Trocheck. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling Savannah Breeze and Blue Christmas, as well as Hissy Fit, Little Bitty Lies, Savannah Blues and her 2008 release, Deep Dish.

An accomplished poet, playwright and fiction writer, Jabari Asim (see him here on the Colbert Report, January 20 2009) has been described as one of the most influential African American literary critics of his generation. He is deputy editor of The Washington Post Book World and also writes a weekly syndicated column on everything from politics to pop culture. He’s written for local theater companies and is the author of A Road to Freedom, a novel for young adults and The N Word, which traces the growth of the word in America. His newest book, What Obama Means…for Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Future – was released on January 20, 2009.

Sponsored by J. Maria Waters

As The Wall Street Journal’s bureau chief in Atlanta, Douglas A. Blackmon manages the paper’s coverage of major transportation companies, publicly-traded companies and institutions based in the southeastern U.S. Over the past 20 years, he has written extensively about the American quandary of race, exploring the integration of schools during his childhood in a Mississippi Delta farm town, lost episodes of the Civil Rights movement, and, repeatedly, the dilemma of how a contemporary society should grapple with a troubled past. Many of his stories in The Wall Street Journal have explored the interplay of wealth, corporate conduct and racial segregation. His book, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude.

Sponsored by Allociea Hall

Roy Blount Jr.’s twenty-first book, Alphabet Juice, was published in October by Farrar, Straus. Last year’s Long Time Leaving: Dispatches From Up South, will appear in paperback in January. Blount grew up in Decatur, Georgia. He was a reporter and columnist for The Atlanta Journal and a part-time English instructor before heading north to work at Sports Illustrated (1968–75). Blount is a panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me, a frequent guest on A Prairie Home Companion, and a columnist for The Oxford American and Garden & Gun. Blount’s writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Playboy, Vanity Fair, GQ, Rolling Stone, and National Geographic. Other books include Be Sweet, Robert E. Lee and Roy Blount’s Book of Southern Humor. He now lives in western Massachusetts.
Sponsored by Tom and Diane Oxnard.

A native of Canton, Georgia, David Bottoms is the author of five books of poetry, including Armored Hearts:  Selected and New Poems and Vagrant Grace, as well as two novels.  He is also a founding editor, along with noted fiction writer Pam Durban, of the literary journal Five Points, published at Georgia State University, where Dr. Bottoms is Professor of Creative Writing.  His first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, was chosen by Robert Penn Warren as the 1979 winner of the prestigious Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets.  He has received an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (with James Dickey and Allen Ginsberg on the selection committee), and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2000, Bottoms was named Georgia’s poet laureate.

The former executive editor of George magazine, Richard Bradley is the author of the number-one New York Times bestseller American Son: A Portrait of John F. Kennedy, Jr. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and the New Republic. Bradley’s book, The Greatest Game: The Day that Bucky, Yaz, Reggie, Pudge, and Company Played the Most Memorable Game in Baseball’s Most Intense Rivalry has been described as, “baseball history at its vivid best.” A graduate of Yale College with an AM in American history from Harvard, Bradley lives in New York City.

Sponsored by Wilson and Linda Fisk Morris

Judith Ortiz Cofer is an acclaimed Puerto Rican author. Her works span a range of literary genres including poetry, short stories, autobiography, essays, and Young Adult novels. Her works detailing Puerto Rican communities and cultural conflicts have made her a leading literary interpreter of the U.S.-Puerto Rican experience. She is currently the Regents’ and Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia.

Sponsored in part by Georgia Poetry Society

Stacy A. Cordery spent the last decade or so studying the Roosevelt family, culminating in the acclaimed Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker. Chair of the History Department at Monmouth College, she teaches World War II, Women’s History, the Vietnam Era, the U.S. in the twentieth century, and assorted interdisciplinary courses. She is currently researching the subject of her next book, Savannah’s Juliette Gordon Low, founder of the Girl Scouts.

Sponsored by Mr. and Mrs. Heyward Gignilliat

Ron Daise was born on St. Helena Island, a coastal South Carolina community in  that still exhibits Gullah culture. A 1978 graduate of Hampton University, Daise has documented Gullah culture and history with books, recordings, and performances since the 1986 publication of Reminiscences of Sea Island Heritage. He and his wife Natalie starred in Nick Jr. TV’s award-winning children’s series, Gullah Gullah Island, along with their children, Sara and Simeon. The show aired from 1994-1999.  Daise’s other books include De Gullah Storybook and Little Muddy Waters, A Gullah Folk Tale and two sticker books, Mr. Bradley’s Day of Surprises and Let’s Go to the Gullah Gullah Island Market. A charter member of The Sea Island Translation Team and Literacy Project, which translated the Bible into Gullah, Daise also is the recipient of The South Carolina Order of the Palmetto and Folk Heritage Awards. He is a board member of the developing International African American Museum of Charleston, S.C. and serves as Vice President for Creative Education at Brookgreen Gardens in Murrells Inlet, S.C.

Adam Davies went to Kenyon College and received an M.F.A. from Syracuse University. He worked as an editorial assistant at Random House in New York City. He has also worked as an instructor of English literature and creative writing at the University of Georgia and now is a professional writing professor at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Davies’ first novel, The Frog King, is being made into a major motion picture directed by Darren Starr of Sex and the City fame. His second novel was the quirky family story Goodbye Lemon, and he is currently writing the screenplay adaptation for his latest novel, Mine All Mine, a twist on the classic crime caper.

Preeminent designer Barry Dixon approaches each project with the design philosophy that the greatest quality a home might possess is that of innate, soulful hospitality. His work features a masterful blend of traditional and contemporary decor that mixes color and texture in astounding ways. Barry Dixon Interiors is the first book to be published on Barry’s work. Released in September 2008 and written by well-known (Scalamandre) author Brian Coleman with luminous photography by Edward Addeo, it promises to be a must for anyone interested in the best of design.

Sponsored by Mr. and Mrs. Howard Morrison

Chad Faries was raised mostly in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, but lived in over 30 different houses around the country by the time he was eighteen. These experiences are chronicled in his memoir, Some Houses: A FariesTale. His book, The Border Will Be Soon was the winner of the 2005 Emergency Press open book competition. He has published poems, essays, photographs, interviews, and creative non-fiction in Exquisite Corpse, Mudfish, New American Writing, Barrow Street, The Cream City Review, Afterimage, Post Road, and others. He has a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and was a Fulbright Fellow in Budapest. He has lived extensively and taught in Central Europe. Currently he is an Assistant Professor at Savannah State University.

Charles Bracelen Flood was born in Manhattan and graduated from Harvard, where he was a member of Archibald MacLeish’s noted creative writing seminar. The 12 books he has written include the novels A Distant Drum and More Lives Than One, as well as The War of the Innocents, his account of a year spent in Vietnam as a correspondent. Flood’s Rise, and Fight Again won the American Revolution Round Table Award in 1976, and Hitler—The Path to Power was among several successful studies in history and biography that followed. Flood’s first venture into the Civil War era was Lee—The Last Years. In Grant and Sherman: The Friendship That Won the Civil War, Flood explores their remarkable partnership, which helped see an entire nation through perilous times. Flood’s newest book is 1864: Lincoln at the Gates of History, to be published on February 03, 2009 – the bicentennial month of Lincoln’s birth.

Mr. Flood’s appearance at the Savannah Book Festival has received an endorsement from the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission.

Sponsored by Dr. and Mrs. John Duttenhaver

Damon Lee Fowler is a nationally-respected authority on the history of Southern foodways. He has authored seven critically-acclaimed cookbooks, including The Savannah Cookbook, New Southern Baking and his newest book, Damon Lee Fowler’s New Southern Kitchen, Traditional Flavors for Contemporary Cooks, was released in September 2008. Fowler has edited and annotated three facsimile reprints of important American cookbooks, and was editor and recipe developer for the Jefferson Foundation’s first Monticello Cookbook, Dining at Monticello. His work has appeared in Food & Wine, Relish, and Charleston Magazine. He lives in Savannah, Georgia, where he teaches cooking and is the feature food writer for the Savannah Morning News.

Sponsored by Aaron and Dayle Levy

Alan Furst was born and raised in Manhattan. He lived in the South of France—as a Fulbright Teaching fellow at the Faculte des Lettres at the University of Montpellier—then in Seattle, where he worked for the City of Seattle Arts Commission. He wrote travel pieces and book reviews for Esquire, and wrote and published four novels. Returning to France, he lived in Paris, wrote a weekly column for The International Herald Tribune, and published his first novel, Night Soldiers, in 1988. He has continued in this genre with nine subsequent novels, the latest released in June of 2008 (The Spies of Warsaw). Publisher’s Weekly describes Furst as “the contemporary master of historical espionage.”

Sponsored by Dr. and Mrs. Thomas McWhorter

Writer and former flight attendant Hollis Gillespie is a syndicated columnist and top-selling author. Her column “Moodswing” appeared for eight years in  Creative Loafing and she is the new back page columnist for Atlanta magazine.  Hollis has been profiled in Marie Claire, Bust, Writer’s Digest and Entertainment Weekly. Her television appearances include The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and TBS Storyline, and her radio commentaries appear regularly on National Public Radio and Georgia Public Broadcasting.  In 2004, Writer’s Digest named Hollis Gillespie a “Breakout Author of the Year.”  The film rights to her first book, Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales from a Bad Neighborhood, are currently under option with a major Hollywood studio.  Two riotous books followed: Confessions of a Recovering Slut and Other Love Stories and Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility.

One of the Southeast’s leading wedding designers, Tara Guérard has created impeccably chic gatherings since 1997, when she opened her event-planning company Soirée. Tara’s stunningly styled images have been featured in Food & Wine, Martha Stewart Weddings, Southern Accents, InStyle Weddings and in her book, Southern Weddings: New Looks from the Old South. Tara was tapped as one of Modern Bride Magazine’s ‘Top 25 Trendsetters for 2005.’ She lives in the historic district of Charleston, South Carolina.

Sponsored by Seeds and Weeds Garden Club

J.A. Jance knew she wanted to be a writer from the moment she read Wizard of Oz in second grade. Jance went on to become the New York Times bestselling author of the J. P. Beaumont series, the Joanna Brady series, three interrelated thrillers featuring the Walker family, and Edge of Evil. Born in South Dakota and brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, Jance lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington, and Tucson, Arizona. She is a graduate of the University of Arizona. Her latest book, Damage Control, was released in July 2008.

Sponsored by BB&T

Beverly Jenkins is an African-American historical romance writer.  Ms. Jenkins has written sixteen books to date and has received numerous awards for her works, including: the Detroit Free Press Book of the Year, three Waldenbooks Best Sellers Awards; two Career Achievement Awards from Romantic Times Magazine; a Golden Pen Award from the Black Writer’s Guild, and in 1999, Ms Jenkins was voted one of the Top Fifty Favorite African-American writers of the 20th Century by AABLC, the nation’s largest on-line African-American book club.

Ann Jones is the nomadic author of eight books of nonfiction, most recently Looking for Lovedu , a travel classic about one woman’s overland journey through Africa, and Kabul in Winter, an account of her years as a humanitarian aid worker among the women of Afghanistan. Among her earlier books is a groundbreaking series on women and violence that includes the bestseller Women Who Kill, soon to be reissued by the Feminist Press as the first in a series of Contemporary Feminist Classics, and the critically acclaimed Next Time, She’ll Be Dead, which Gloria Steinem called “the one book you should read about domestic violence.” Her work as an international journalist and photographer, reporting from every continent and many remote corners of the world, has appeared in a wide range of publications, from the New York Times and the Guardian (London) to Marie Claire Brazil and Vogue. Having spent the last eight years doing humanitarian work in conflict zones, she is now working on a book about the impact of the violence of war on women worldwide. She is a regular contributor to The Nation and the indispensible www.tomdispatch.com.

David Kirby is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University. Kirby’s work has garnered four Pushcart Prizes, the Guy Owen Prize, the Kay Deeter Award, the James Dickey Prize, and has twice been included in Best American Poetry. His volumes of poetry have won the Brittingham Prize and the Millennium Cultural Recognition Award.  Kirby has received four Fellowships from the Florida Arts Council, one from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.  His collected earlier poems have been published as I Think I Am Going to Call My Wife Paraguay.  His most recent publications include The Temple Gate Called Beautiful and The House on Boulevard St., which was nominated for the 2007 National Book Award in poetry.He has just completed a biography of Georgia native and R&B legend Little Richard, titled, Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll.  Sponsored by Robert Glisson and David Sauers.

Donald L. Miller is the John Henry MacCracken Professor of History at Lafayette College. He is the author of nine books, among them City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America, The Story of World War II, and D-Days in the Pacific.  Miller’s books have been nominated for every major American literary prize, including the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle award. Miller’s 2006 effort, Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany, was premiered at the Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum. Miller is currently working as chief historical consultant and script editor on two film projects: a Tom Hanks production on WWII for the National D-Day Museum and a 10-part History Channel series on WWII, based on the diaries of Allied and Axis combatants and on color film footage collected from archives throughout the world and converted to high definition.

Sponsored by Mr. and Mrs. John T. Neises

Jonathan Miller lives in Charleston, South Carolina.  He writes and illustrates the children’s book series, The Adventures of Sammy the Wonder Dachshund. His book, Sammy’s Last Week in Charleston, will be released on December 17th, 2008.  Jonathan graduated from the College of Charleston in 2002 where he majored in Business.  He began making intricate designs out of construction paper for friends, then decided to adapt the technique to books.  Jonathan will be reading from his new book and demonstrating his amazing artistry with construction paper.

Charles F. Price is the author of the Hiwassee series, four works of historical fiction set in his native Western North Carolina. The books comprise a single narrative cycle interweaving the partly imagined private history of his 19th-century ancestors with the public history of the Southern Appalachians. 2008 saw the release of Nor the Battle to the Strong: A Novel of the American Revolution in the South.  Gen. Nathanael Greene, who figured prominently in the Revolution in Georgia and lived near Savannah at the time of his death, is a prominent character in the book.

Sponsored by Deric and Mary Ann Beil

Sunday Brunch Talk, February 7, 2010
11:30 am – 2 pm

A Greenville, Mississippi native, Julia Reed is a regular contributor to the New York Times, Garden & Gun and to the website www.wowowow.com. She has written for Vogue, Newsweek, and many other publications. Her 2004 book, Queen of the Turtle Derby and Other Southern Phenomena, is a collection of wise and witty essays about the Southern way of life.  She released two new books in summer 2008, The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story; and Ham Biscuits, Hostess Gowns, and Other Southern Specialties: An Entertaining Life. Reed lives in the Garden District of New Orleans with her husband and a spoiled beagle.

The fundraising Sunday Brunch and Talk by Ms. Reed, a much-anticipated event in Savannah’s social calendar, will be held in Jepson Center for the Arts on Telfair Square from 11:30 am to 2:00 pm.

Tickets are on sale now through the Savannah Box Office.

Sunday Brunch talk sponsored by

She’s much more than Chris Rock’s mom; author and radio show host Rose Rock has been a special needs schoolteacher, a preschool administrator, a mother of ten and a foster mother of 17. Rock begins simply, and significantly, with her own mother’s advice: “Being a parent is not about being right, it’s about doing right.” Rock is the author of Mama Rock’s Rules: Ten Lessons on Raising a Houseful of Successful Children. After her 11 am Savannah Book Festival appearance, Ms. Rock will facilitate a parenting workshop and book signing at 3 pm at the Savannah Civic Center, presented as a collaborative effort by  the Savannah Black Heritage Festival, Parent University and the Savannah Book Festival. For reservation instructions, click here or call 912-351-6320.

Preston Russell has been a physician, painter, writer, and historian in Savannah for over thirty years. In 1976, the French government chose three of Preston’s works for the American Artists in Paris exhibit. His recently published book, The Low Country: From Savannah to Charleston, displays 85 paintings which capture the mystique of this region. Dr. Russell also co-authored the ambitious Savannah: A History of Her People Since 1733 and Lights of Madness: In Search of Joan of Arc.

Ferrol Sams is a physician, humorist, storyteller, best-selling novelist and the author of eight books, the first published when Sams was 60 years old. Most notable is his trilogy of novels in which an eccentric and quixotic hero, Porter Osborne Jr., mirrors Sams’ own Georgia boyhood in Fayette County, Georgia. All of his works are rooted in the oral traditions of southern humor and folklore. Sams’ fiction celebrates love of the land, the changing southern landscape, and what he calls “being raised right” in the rural South. His novel When All the World Was Young won the Townsend Prize for Fiction in 1991. In 2006, Run with the Horsemen was selected as the inaugural text in the Atlanta Reads: One Book, One Community program. In 2007 Sams was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.

Nic Sheff is a recovering drug addict and alcoholic. Still in his early twenties, he continues to fight daily battles with his addictions. His writing has been published in Newsweek, Nerve, and the San Francisco Chronicle. His memoir Tweak, Growing Up On Methamphetamines recounts his life as an addict and his recover from addiction. His father is noted author David Sheff, who published a companion memoir, Beautiful Boy. A former resident of Savannah, Nic is currently living in Oregon.

Vivian Shipley is the author of five chapbooks and seven books of poetry. She has been nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize, first for When There Is No Shore and then for Gleanings: Old Poems, New Poems. Her seventh book of poems, Hardboot: Poems New & Old, won the 2006 Paterson Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement. In 2007, Shipley won the New Millennium Poetry Prize and the Hackney Literary Award for Poetry. She has also been inducted into the University of Kentucky Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame. All of Your Messages Have Been Erased is Shipley’s newest book of poetry.

Natasha Trethewey is the author of Native Guard, for which she won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize, Bellocq’s Ophelia, which was named a Notable Book for 2003 by the American Library Association, and Domestic Work. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Currently, she is Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Emory University. She is the recipient of the 2008 Mississippi Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts for Poetry and was also named the 2008 Georgia Woman of the Year.

Sponsored by Mr. and Mrs. Edward Brown

Erica Simone Turnipseed‘s debut, A Love Noire, won the Atlanta Choice Author of the Year Award from the Atlanta Daily World. A philanthropist, Turnipseed founded the Five Years for the House Initiative, a fundraising drive for the Afro American Cultural Center at Yale. She lives with her husband in Brooklyn, New York.

Raised in the bayous of Louisiana, Ken Wells is a senior writer and features editor for page one of The Wall Street Journal. In 1982, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for The Miami Herald. He has written four novels set in bayou country. He recently completed his second non-fiction narrative called, The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayous: a Tale of Blue-Collar Valor in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Sponsored by Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Stephens

Leslie Walker Williams was born and raised in Savannah, Georgia and currently lives in Vancouver, B.C. Her short stories have appeared in The Iowa Review, The Madison Review, Harvard Review, and American Fiction. Her first novel, The Prudent Mariner, was awarded the Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel and the Morris Hackney Literary Award for the Novel.

Sponsored by Katherine and Dolly Chisholm and Eleanor Foster

Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop was born and raised in New York City. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from Harvard University in 2001. In 2004 she received her MFA in fiction from the University of California at Irvine, and she was the recipient of the Schaeffer Writing Fellowship for the 2004-5 academic year. She lives in Savannah, Georgia. She has published two works of fiction, Fireworks (2007) and December (2008).

The son and grandson of Klansmen, Bob Zellner became the
first white southerner to serve as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).   His life a virtual roadmap of social responsibility, Zellner served the Civil Rights Movement tirelessly and has dedicated his life to protesting on behalf of social change and equal rights. In his memoir, The Wrong Side of Murder Creek, A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement with Constance Curry, Zellner tells how one white Alabamian joined ranks with the black students who were sitting-in, marching, fighti

Atlanta-based co-author Constance Curry graduated from Agnes Scott College both Phi Beta Kappa and Summa Cum Laude in 1955. After studying abroad as a Fulbright Scholar, she returned to Atlanta in 1960. She was the first white woman appointed to the SNCC executive board. From 1964 to 1975, she worked as a field representative for the American Friends Services Committee. The civil rights veteran has written several books, including the award-winning Silver Rights, from which she produced a documentary film entitled The Intolerable Burden. Curry has also published Mississippi Harmony: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter and Aaron Henry: The Fire Ever Burning.

Sponsored by Chatham-Savannah Citizen Advocacy

Longtime Savannah resident and veteran golf-and-travel writer Joel Zuckerman is the author of five books, including the recently-released Pete Dye Golf Courses – Fifty Years of Visionary Design. This latest effort was named one of the Top 10 golf books of 2008 by Sports Illustrated, and was lauded in USA Today, GOLF Magazine and Golf Digest, among numerous other publications. Zuckerman has played more than 600 courses around the world, and has written for more than 100 publications, including Sports Illustrated, SKY Magazine, Continental, Millionaire, and virtually every major golf magazine.