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Blount Jr., Roy

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.

Reed, Julia

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

Owens, Janis

Novelist, memoirist, folklorist and premier storyteller Janis Owens is the award-winning author of three acclaimed novels: My Brother Michael, winner of the Chautauqua South Fiction Award for Best Novel; Myra Sims; and most recently, The Schooling of Claybird Catts. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Writer’s Digest, and many other publications. Author Pat Conroy has called her "one of the finest novelists of our time." Owens' new book, The Cracker Kitchen: A Cookbook in Celebration of Cornbread-Fed, Down-Home Family Stories and Cuisine, is part-cookbook, part-family memoir and celebrates the backwoods resilience of a much maligned section of Southern culture: the hapless, toothless cracker. Owens traces the roots of the word back to its origins and offers a refreshing anthropological exploration of this group of proud, fiercely independent Americans and their deep love of family, country, stories and food. Sponsored by Gerald and Helen Stephens.

Mason, Susan

Beyond creating extraordinary wedding and private event spreads, Savannah caterer Susan Mason has worked on movies filmed in Savannah, supplying food for crews, catering private parties for stars and "dressing" sets with food. Her catering is now in demand far from Savannah, desired by those who can afford to bring a bit of Southern hospitality to their private celebrations. Her book, Susan Mason's Silver Service, demonstrates Mason's exquisite taste and inherent sense of style. Her suggestions for quality ingredients and stunning presentations are included in more than eighty recipes, along with quotes from celebrity clients and humorous stories about catering for the rich and famous. Mason grew up in Dothan, Alabama, and her cooking has been highlighted in two previous cookbooks and featured in Elle Decor, Veranda, Southern Accents, GQ, Panache, and Saveur. Sponsored by Helen Downing, and by Dayle and Aaron Levy.

Hannon, Lauretta

Named "the funniest woman in Georgia" by Southern Living, Lauretta Hannon shows the world a different kind of girl raised in the South—a strong, authentic, fearless, flawed, resourceful and sometimes outrageous woman. From her wildly popular NPR segments to her boisterous one-woman show, Lauretta transforms Cracker Queen from an epithet into high praise. With an unflinching voice reminiscent of Mary Karr, The Cracker Queen: A Memoir of a Jagged, Joyful Life takes readers from backwater Warner Robins, Georgia, to Savannah’s most eccentric neighborhoods. This wild ride features a distinctly dysfunctional family (including Crazy Aunt Carrie, who nearly kills all four of her husbands and is jailed for assaulting a police dog) and a lively crew of hellions, heroines, bad seeds, and renegades (from a lady who keeps the Baby Jesus chained up in her front yard to the famous Goat Man of Georgia), all of which have given Lauretta the resilience and humor that are now the hallmarks of her Cracker Queen approach to life. Full of warmth, outrageous wit, and world-class storytelling, The Cracker Queen is a celebration of living out loud, finding humor in desperate situations and loving life to death. Sponsored by Lisa and Mason White.

Bragg, Rick

Rick Bragg, author of the critically acclaimed and best-selling All Over but the Shoutin' and a Pulitzer Prize-winning national correspondent for the New York Times, says he learned to tell stories by listening to the masters, the people of the foothills of the Appalachians. They talked, of the sadness, poverty, cruelty, kindness, hope, hopelessness, faith, anger and joy of their everyday lives, and painted pictures on the very haze of the early evening, when work faded into story-telling. Those stories are the backbone of his third book, Ava's Man, the story of a whiskey man, poacher, roofer and folk legend who was his mother's father, and the grandfather he never saw. His first book, Shoutin', was the story of a mother who absorbed the cruelties of an alcoholic husband haunted by his service in the Korean War, and showed how she gave her life, in endless cotton fields, to make a living for her three sons. The book, a New York Times notable book of the year, won several awards and was selected as one of the best books of the year by several news organizations and reader groups. But more important than the fact it made the New York Times Best-Seller list, says Bragg, is the fact that the book became an anthem for the working people and poor people of the modern-day South. Sponsored by Bill and Susan Lovett.

Leleux, Robert

In a starred review of Robert Leleux’s book, The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy, Publisher’s Weekly says that “teacher, freelance writer and first-time author Leleux proves he’s already a master of the snappy one-liner and the improbably hilarious in this rollicking, bitter-sweet (emphasis on the bitter) coming-of-age memoir.  Featuring a larger-than life mother addicted to shopping and surgical makeovers, Leleux admits to having ‘tilted’ the story so that it ‘reads better (as in funnier, or happier) than it was lived’; still, it’s a rocky trip that obviously required a highly evolved sense of humor to get through (fortunately, Leleux makes himself as big a target as his extravagant mother). "Beginning with his father’s abandonment when Leleux was 17, the author traces the erratic aftermath in the home of his desperate mom, whose plan to remarry rich leads her to pursue a risky and exorbitant series of surgical enhancements, turning inside-out Leleux’s hope that ‘the end of marriage [would be] only the beginning of plastic surgery and happy new lives.’  In the meantime, Robert meets and unexpectedly falls in love with Michael Leleux, learning for the first time that he’s gay and, further, that his mom has already known.  Not for the timid, this laugh-out-loud tale of dysfunction and discovery is a compulsively readable treat; any fan of Augusten Burroughs or David Sedaris owes it to themselves to pick it up." Sponsored by the Savannah Book Festival.