(SAVANNAH, GA) Memoir has become a hot literary genre, and the Savannah Book Festival will offer nine diverse and fascinating memoirists in its line-up this year, in addition to dozens of other acclaimed authors of fiction, lifestyle, history and poetry.
Riceboro, Georgia native Dawn Baker is a WTOC news anchor and award winning journalist who has covered stories from Ghana to Guatemala. Her memoir and advice book is Dawn’s Daughter: Everything a Woman Needs to Know.
World-famous novelist Pat Conroy has also written several memoirs, the latest of which, My Reading Life, celebrates the writers and stories that influenced, beguiled and led him to become a man of letters. Kirkus Book Reviews called this personal account “truly affecting.”
Melissa Fay Greene, whose bestselling Praying for Sheetrock won several major literary prizes, is a 2011 inductee into the Georgia Writer’s Hall of Fame. A former resident of Savannah, Greene has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Elle and Newsweek. She and her husband are raising nine children, several of them adopted, and her most recent book, No Biking in the House Without a Helmet, about raising such a large family, has been widely praised.
Karl Marlantes, author of the acclaimed debut novel Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War, has now written a memoir, What It Is Like to Go to War, in which he tempers the brutal truths of fear, power games and courage with a thoughtful prescription for our soldiers’ well-being.
Michael Oher, the real-life hero behind the story The Blind Side, which was made into an award-winning film, will speak about his memoir I Beat the Odds: From Homelessness to The Blind Side and Beyond. Oher now plays football for the Baltimore Ravens.
In Janisse Ray’s Drifting into Darien, Ray recounts how, as a babe in arms when a boat of her father’s construction cracked open and went down in the mighty Altamaha River, she was tucked in a life preserver and washed onto a sandbar as the craft sank from view. That first baptism began a lifelong relationship with a stunning and powerful river that almost nobody knows.
University of Georgia football fans will delight in Uga owner Sonny Seiler and co-author Kent Hannon’s Damn Good Dawgs, a rare glimpse into the personal, 50-year history of Uga, the nationally acclaimed mascot for the Georgia Bulldogs–English bulldogs so revered they are buried in a mausoleum at Sanford Stadium when they die.
Finally, Ranger and combat veteran Captain Scott Smiley is the author of Hope Unseen: The Story Behind the Army’s First Blind Active-Duty Officer. Smiley lost his site in a car bombing in 2005, but since then he has not only served as his company commander, he has also skied, surfed, sky-dived and mountain-climbed, all after losing his sight. A recipient of the Bronze Star and The Purple Heart, Smiley was recently named the recipient of the Army’s MacArthur Leadership Awards.
For more information about these and other authors appearing at this year’s Savannah Book Festival please visit http://www.savannahbookfestival.org/festivals/2012/.
The Savannah Book Festival Inc. is an independent, non-profit corporation led by a volunteer board of directors. The South’s biggest story, the Festival will take place during the week leading up to Presidents Day, February 15-19, 2012, in and around Telfair Square in historic downtown Savannah. For more information, please contact Executive Director Robin Gold at (912) 598-4040 or info@savannahbookfestival.org. Or visit our website at http://www.savannahbookfestival.org/; our Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=110788820480; and follow us on Twitter at @SavBookFestival. Lose yourself in books!