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Kirby, David

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.

Edwards, Selden

Thirty years in the writing, Selden Edwards's dazzling first novel, The Little Book, is an irresistible triumph of the imagination. Wheeler Burden—banking heir, philosopher, student of history, legend's son, rock idol, writer, lover, recluse, half-Jew, and Harvard baseball hero—one day finds himself wandering not in his hometown of San Francisco in 1988 but in a city and time he knows mysteriously well: Vienna, 1897. Before long, Wheeler acquires a mentor in Sigmund Freud, a bitter rival, a powerful crush on a luminous young woman, and encounters everyone from an eight-year-old Adolf Hitler to Mark Twain as well as the young members of his own family. Solving the riddle of Wheeler's dislocation in time will ultimately reveal nothing short of one eccentric family's unrivaled impact upon the course of human history. A graduate of Princeton and Stanford universities, Selden Edwards is a former English teacher and headmaster. He began writing The Little Book in 1974. Sponsored by Wilson and Linda Fisk Morris.

Huston, Allegra

Allegra Huston's new book, Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found, hit bookstores in April 2009, and received rave reviews from Melik Kaylan at Forbes, Lynn Barber in the Daily Telegraph and wOw’s own Liz Smith, among others.  It appeared on the bestseller lists of the San Francisco Chronicle and Denver Post, and was shortlisted for Best First Biography by the prestigious Biographers' Club in the UK.  Allegra writes of losing her mother at age four, and the odyssey that followed--in which she met one father (John Huston) right after her mother's death, and then her actual father (British historian John Julius Norwich) at age twelve.  Her story is one of conflicting identities, the treacheries of memory, forgiveness, and a fragmented family made whole. Sponsored by Dr. and Mrs. Preston Russell.

Carter, Christine Jacobson

In Southern Single Blessedness: Unmarried Women in the Urban South, 1800-1865, Christine Jacobson Carter uncovers the fruitful and interesting lives of single women—and the attitudes toward them—in the bustling urban centers of nineteenth-century Savannah and Charleston. She is also the editor of The Diary of Dolly Lunt Burge, 1848-1879. Carter is a visiting assistant professor of history at Emory University, where she studies and writes about the nineteenth-century United States, particularly southern families and American women. She earned her Ph.D. from Emory University, and her books grew out of her work there. Southern Single Blessedness was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2006 as part of the Women in American History series, and both of her titles are now available in paperback. Sponsored by

Beha, Christopher

Christopher Beha, an assistant editor at Harper's magazine, set out to read all 22,000 pages of the 100-year-old Harvard Classics in one year. Equal parts memoir and intellectual excursion, The Whole Five Feet is the story of a modern young man who spends a year in passionate engagement with the past, rediscovering the relevance of the great books. Beha’s essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The Believer, Tin House, Bookforum, and elsewhere. He is the co-editor, with Joyce Carol Oates, of the Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction. Sponsored by Kaye and Don Kole.

Allen, James Sloan

A cultural historian, essayist and critic, James Sloan Allen has written widely on many subjects ranging from European thought and American society to Hindu and Islamic cultures, from ancient philosophy to modernist design.  His book The Romance of Commerce and Culture was widely praised and hailed by the noted critic O.B. Hardison as "one of the most significant pieces of cultural history to be published in the last decade."  His new book, Worldly Wisdom: Great Books and the Meanings of Life, explores some fifty classic writings of the world for their understanding of human life and advice on living it well.   The distinguished author and diplomat Stanton H. Burnett has written of Worldly Wisdom: "For many readers, this will become the most important, most frequently consulted book on their shelves."  With a doctorate in European intellectual history from Columbia University, he has taught at several institutions, including Columbia, Haverford College, Brigham Young University, the New School and the Juilliard School, where he was academic vice president.  He continues to teach a Great Books class for adults in New York City.  A long-time New Yorker, he now resides with his wife in Honolulu and Philadelphia. Sponsored by Deric and Mary Ann Beil.