Savannah Book Festival

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.

An internationally acclaimed writer and scholar of religions, Dr. Reza Aslan has garnered much critical praise for his work on Islam and the west. In his book How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror, as renowned author Jon Meacham notes, “it is Aslan’s great gift to see things clearly, and to say them clearly, and in this important new work he offers us a way forward.”

Aslan’s first book was the New York Times Bestseller, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, which has been translated into thirteen languages, short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award in the UK, and nominated for a PEN USA award for research Non-Fiction. In 2010, Norton will publish his edited anthology, Words Without Borders: Writings from the Middle East.

Dr. Aslan is co-founder of BoomGen Studios, the first ever motion-picture company focused entirely on entertainment about the greater Middle East and its diaspora communities, as well as editorial executive of Mecca.com. A contributing editor at the Daily Beast, he holds degrees in religions from Santa Clara University, Harvard University, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, as well as a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa, where he was named the Truman Capote Fellow in Fiction. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, and the Pacific Council on International Policy. Born in Iran, he now lives in Los Angeles where he is assistant professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. Sponsored by Kay and Don Gardner.

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.

When novelist Bertice Berry set out to write a history of her family, she initially believed she’d uncover a story of slavery and black pain; but the deeper she dug, the more surprises she found. There was heartache, yes, but also something unexpected: hope. Peeling away the layers, Berry came to learn that the history of slavery cannot be quantified in simple, black-and-white terms of “good” and “evil,” but is rather a complex tapestry of roles and relations, of choices and individual responsibility.

In this poignant, reflective memoir, The Ties that Bind, Berry skillfully relays the evolution of relations between the races, from slavery to Reconstruction, from the struggles of the Civil Rights movement and the Black Power 1970s on to the present day. In doing so, she sheds light on a picture of the past that not only liberates but also unites and evokes the need to forgive and be forgiven.
Sponsored by

Over the past 20 years, Douglas A. Blackmon 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.

In 2000, the National Association of Black Journalists recognized Blackmon’s stories revealing the secret role of J.P. Morgan & Co. during the 1960s in funneling funds between a wealthy northern white supremacist and segregationists fighting the Civil Rights Movement in the South. A year later, he revealed in The Journal how U.S. Steel Corp. relied on forced black laborers in Alabama coal mines in the early 20th century, an article which led to his first book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Slavery By Another Name, which broadly examines how a form of neoslavery thrived in the U.S. long after legal abolition.

As The Wall Street Journal’s bureau chief in Atlanta, he manages the paper’s coverage of airlines and other major transportation companies and publicly traded companies and institutions based in the southeastern U.S. The bureau directly covers the Centers for Disease Control, the World Health Organization, and more than 1,200 companies, including Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, Delta Air Lines, Bank of America, Wachovia, Wells Fargo, United Parcel Service and FedEx. The Journal staff in Atlanta also writes about key news and issues in the 11-state region, including race, immigration, poverty, politics and, in recent years, global warming and hurricanes.

Blackmon’s stories or the work of his team have been widely acclaimed, including for coverage of the subprime meltdown, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Florida hurricanes in 2004 and for his 2001 examination of slave labor in the 20th century. His article on U.S. Steel was included in the 2003 edition of Best Business Stories. The Journal’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina received a special National Headliner award in 2006.

Blackmon joined the Journal in October 1995 as a reporter in Atlanta. Prior to joining the Journal, Blackmon was a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he covered race and politics, and special assignments including the fall of the Berlin Wall and the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. Previously, he was a reporter for the Arkansas Democrat, managing editor of the Daily Record in Little Rock, Ark, and a writer for weekly newspapers.

Blackmon penned his first newspaper story at the age of 12, for the Progress, in his hometown of Leland, Mississippi. He graduated from Hendrix College in Conway, Ark., and lives in Atlanta with his wife and two children.

Sponsored by

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.

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.

Stacey Lynn Brown was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, and studied at Emory University, Oxford University, and The University of Oregon, where she received her MFA in Poetry. Ranging from poems to plays and essays, her work has appeared in various literary journals, including Crab Orchard Review, Poetry Daily, The Cortland Review, Natural Bridge, Sou’wester, and The Southern Quarterly, as well as the anthology From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great. Her book-length poem in sections, Cradle Song, was published by C&R Press in January, 2009. Poems from Cradle Song have won awards from The Poetry Center of Chicago and have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In her work, Brown writes movingly about missing the south, about the astonishing variety of worship below the Mason-Dixon line, and about family.  She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, where she lives with her husband, poet Adrian Matejka, and their daughter.
Sponsored by Mary and Howard Morrison.

Celebrating Eudora Tribute Concert, Saturday, February 6th, 2010, 8 pm

“I’ve always written stories about people and everyday living,” says Kate Campbell. “But after reading a quote from Frederick Buechner, I kept thinking about the phrase, ’save the day,’ and it just began to have a life of its own.”

With her compassionate tone and sometimes-quirky approach, Kate Campbell has made a musical niche for herself telling stories exploring the complex topics of race, religion, history and human relationships. It started with her award-winning debut record, 1995’s Songs from the Levee, and continues with her latest offering, Save the Day. The new project also includes shades of Kate’s entire musical history — running the gamut from R&B and pop rhythms to gospel, country and folk sounds.

The incomparable John Prine sings along on “Looking for Jesus,” a tune with a unique spin on modern-day pilgrimages. Nanci Griffith’s distinctive voice is heard on “Fordlandia,” which tells the story of industrial pioneer Henry Ford’s failed attempt at building a tire factory in the Amazon. These tunes are the latest examples of Kate’s knack for uncovering peculiar, nearly forgotten stories and weaving them into song.

People often ask Kate where she gets her song ideas. Kate explains, “I just find certain things interesting and pay attention to them. That’s the way I’ve always been.” Kate’s lyrics have often been compared to the works of southern wordsmiths Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty, so it’s no surprise that several tunes on the project found their inspiration in the literary world.

Kate is now curious to see how these twelve songs fit with the rest of her material in concert. As she continues her musical journey, Save the Day rightfully takes its place among her previous releases, which have earned high praise and features from media outlets like Entertainment Weekly and National Public Radio.

Whether it’s someone who discovers Kate Campbell for the first time, or a longtime fan, the listener soon realizes that each of Kate’s tunes resonates with the hopefulness of the Buechner quote found in the CD liner notes: “It is no wonder that just the touch of another human being at a dark time can be enough to save the day.

Campbell, along with Mary Chapin Carpenter, Caroline Herring and Claire Holley, will perform Celebrating Eudora, a tribute concert to famed Southern writer Eudora Welty.  A ticketed fundraising event for the Festival, the concert will take place in historic Trinity United Methodist Church at 8 pm on Saturday, February 6th, 2010.

Tickets are on sale now through the Savannah Box Office.

Concert sponsored by Carolyn Luck & by John and Stephanie Duttenhaver.

Celebrating Eudora Tribute Concert, Saturday, February 6th, 2010, 8 pm

Mary Chapin Carpenter has always chosen her own path. From her first gigs as a rising star on Washington, D.C.’s folk scene in the early 1980s, she has made a reputation as both a singer and songwriter with a mind of her own. Over the course of an 11-album recording career, Carpenter has won five Grammy Awards and sold over 13 million records. She has scored 12 top 10 singles, including “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her,” which was nominated for a Record of the Year Grammy.

Carpenter signed with Zoë Records in 2007, and her first release with the label, The Calling, received a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Folk/Americana Album, her fifteenth overall Grammy nomination. In 2008, Zoë Records released Carpenter’s first holiday album, Come Darkness, Come Light, which includes some favorite Christmas songs by other writers, rarely heard traditional tunes, and six Carpenter originals. On April 27 2010, Zoë Records will release Carpenter’s twelfth album, The Age of Miracles. 

Carpenter has achieved the same success as a live performer having toured nationally and internationally for nearly two decades winning two Pollstar Country Tour of the Year awards.

She has remained immersed in humanitarian work throughout her career, performing in support of cancer and AIDS research, U.S. troops overseas, the Campaign for a Landmine Free World and hunger relief efforts, among other causes. Carpenter was also part of a CNN special on the anniversary of September 11, and recently she has contributed a regular, bi-weekly column to The Washington Times. Additionally, Carpenter has been featured on NBC’s “Today Show;” CBS’s “Late Show with David Letterman,” NPR’s “Morning Edition”, NPR’s “All Things Considered” and CBS News’ “Sunday Morning.”

Carpenter, along with Kate Campbell, Caroline Herring and Claire Holley, will perform Celebrating Eudora, a tribute concert to famed Southern writer Eudora Welty.  A ticketed fundraising event for the Festival, the concert will take place in historic Trinity United Methodist Church at 8 pm on Saturday, February 6th, 2010.

Tickets are on sale now through the Savannah Box Office.

Concert sponsored by Carolyn Luck, & by John and Stephanie Duttenhaver.

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

Rosemary Daniell is known as one of the best writing coaches in the country. The author of Secrets of the Zona Rosa: How Writing (and Sisterhood) Change Women’s Lives, its prequel, The Woman Who Spilled Words All Over Herself: Writing and Living The Zona Rosa Way, she is the founder and leader of Zona Rosa®, a series of writing and living workshops in Savannah, Atlanta, and cities throughout the country, as well as in Europe, as profiled in People and Southern Living magazines.But first and foremost, she is the award-winning author of six other books of poetry and prose. Her revolutionary memoir, Fatal Flowers: On Sin, Sex and Suicide in the Deep South, won the 1999 Palimpsest Prize for a most-requested out-of-print book. Along with her second memoir, Sleeping with Soldiers, it was a forerunner of the current memoir trend. Along with her four other books of poetry and prose, they were widely and nationally reviewed in many publications, among them Time magazine, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Ms., and Rolling Stone.

Her features and reviews have appeared in Self, Harper’s Bazaar, Mademoiselle, New York Woman, Mother Jones, Travel & Leisure, The New York Times Book Review and many other publications - as someone once wittily introduced her, “She’s the only writer I know who’s been published in both Mademoiselle and Mother Jones!” She has also appeared on such radio and television shows as CNN Health, The Diane Roehm Show, Larry King, Donahue, Sally Jessy Raphael, Hour Magazine, and Merv Griffin. Among her many awards are two NEA grants in literature, one in poetry, another in fiction.

Sponsored by Jack and Mary Romanos.

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.

2010 Keynote Speaker

Diagnosed with dyslexia as a child, Vince Flynn struggled with reading and writing for years. Proof that living well is the best revenge, Flynn is now the author of 11 bestselling political thrillers, including his current novel, Pursuit of Honor. Read by current and former presidents, foreign heads of state and intelligence professionals, Flynn’s novels are taken so seriously that one high-ranking CIA official told his people, “I want you to read Flynn’s books and start thinking about how we can more effectively wage this war on terror.”

Keynote Speech sponsored by Mr. and Mrs. Dick Eckburg.
Author sponsored by Mark and Inge Moore, by Curt and Libba Anderson, and by Jack and Mary Romanos.

Starkey Flythe graduated from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, served with the U.S. Army in East Africa, and has taught school in South Carolina and Georgia. He was re-founding editor of The Saturday Evening Post in the 1980s, and won the University of Iowa Press award in 1989 for a collection of short stories, Lent: The Slow Fast. His book of poems, Paying the Anesthesiologist, was published by Ninety-Six Press in 1995. His most recent collection of poems, They Say Dancing, was published in 2000 and explores the tension between the urban and the pastoral, the modern and the ancient, life and death. Flythe lives in Augusta, Georgia.
Sponsored by Michael and Suzanne Ainslie, and by Susan and Steve Hoffius.

George Dawes Green’s second novel, The Juror, sold more than 900,000 copies and spawned a movie of the same name starring Demi Moore and Alec Baldwin. The author also launched The Moth, a popular not-for-profit club and NPR radio show featuring actors, writers and others telling true stories drawn from their lives. His darkly comic thriller, Ravens, about hoodlums who attempt to extort money from a family of lottery winners, has just been released. Sponsored by Marilyn Brady and by Alvin Neely.

Barbara Hamby is a Writer-in-Residence at Florida State University. Her first full-length book of poetry, Delirium, won the Vassar Miller Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Prize.  Her second book, The Alphabet of Desire, won the New York University Prize for Poetry and was chosen by the New York Public Library as one of the 25 best books of 1999. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2000, Pushcart Prizes 2001, The Paris Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review and many other magazines. She has won three fellowships from the Florida Arts Council and one from the National Endowment for the Arts. Hamby’s third book, Babel, was chosen for the 2003 AWP/Donald Hall Prize by Stephen Dunn, who said of her work, “This is poetry that energizes, that dares to give us a high-wire performer’s notion of a good time. Sponsored by Southern Poetry Review, and by

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.

Celebrating Eudora Tribute Concert, Saturday, February 6th, 2010, 8 pm

Caroline Herring’s fourth album, Golden Apples of the Sun, is her most intimate and mature to date. Combining haunting originals with some surprising new takes on old standards, Herring has created an album that at once recalls the folk heyday of the 1960s and 70s while also sounding entirely fresh and new.

Herring has built a name for herself by crafting in-depth story songs, with critics continually describing her work as “timeless”, “pure”, “graceful” and “powerful.” Her last release, Lantana, was named by National Public Radio as one of the “Top Ten Best Folk Albums for 2008.” While critics and fans have long praised the purity and complexity of her voice, drawing comparisons to Joan Baez and Kate Wolf, the vocal performances on Golden Apples of the Sun are as comfortable and intimate as any Herring has produced. It is the most true to stage release of her career, and Herring gives credit to producer David “Goody” Goodrich, who crafted the stripped-down sound in the Signature Sounds studio in Connecticut. Armed primarily with just her guitar and live vocals, the finished product has all the marks of a fully developed artist and performer.

Emboldened by the critical acclaim of her recent work, Herring continues to create what Vintage Guitar has called “musical tapestries full of dark landscapes, bittersweet images, and otherworldly moments.” As usual, Herring draws inspiration from a wide range of sources. The album’s lead song “Tales of the Islander” is vintage Herring, an inspired and inspirational paean to the Gulf Coast folk artist Walter Anderson and the closing track, “The Great Unknown”, takes off from a passage from Dante’s Inferno. Yet Herring also includes beautifully crafted, intimate songs such as “The Dozens” and “Abuelita” drawn from her personal experience.

Perhaps the most unexpected aspect of the new album, however, is the tribute Herring pays to the iconic female songwriters and singers who influenced her. Herring’s work has always been identified with the traditions of her native South, yet on Golden Apples of the Sun Herring filters the sounds and inspiration of Joni Mitchell and Judy Collins through her own distinctive musical sensibilities.

Long-time Herring fans are sure to appreciate her evocative interpretations of Mitchell’s “Cactus Tree” as well as the traditional bluegrass tune “Long Black Veil” and the blues classic “See See Rider.” Herring also tackles “True Colors,” a song made famous by Cyndi Lauper, giving a newfound strength and directness to the pop song. These choices may seem like strange bedfellows on paper, but filtered through Herring’s sensibility – stark, elegant, and bittersweet – they settle in exquisitely alongside her original compositions. Sonically unguarded and daringly intimate, Golden Apples of the Sun continues a creative evolution that has solidified Herring as musician of consistent depth and resonance.

Herring, along with Kate Campbell, Mary Chapin Carpenter and Claire Holley, will perform Celebrating Eudora, a tribute concert to famed Southern writer Eudora Welty.  A ticketed fundraising event for the Festival, the concert will take place in historic Trinity United Methodist Church at 8 pm on Saturday, February 6th, 2010.

Tickets are on sale now through the Savannah Box Office.

Concert sponsored by Carolyn Luck, & by John and Stephanie Duttenhaver.

Celebrating Eudora Tribute Concert, Saturday, February 6th, 2010, 8 pm

Claire Holley  writes songs that are literary, playful, meditative, and earthy.  A native of Mississippi, she owes much to the southern tradition of storytelling, and just as much to the southern tradition of charm, which is to say of knowing how much is too much and how much is enough, of finding just the right blend of mystery and brass, seductiveness and self-deprecation.  With spare, delicate arrangements and a frank, lovely, and versatile sound, she sings deceptively simple songs.  Holley began performing and writing songs in college, but she released her first recordings while living in Chapel Hill, NC.  She received regular airplay on WUNC’s “Back Porch Music,” and her self-titled debut from Yep Roc Records was featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition.  Upon moving to the west coast in 2004, Holley began composing for film and theater.  She was nominated by the 2006 LA Weekly Theatre Awards for Best Original Music for the songs she wrote for “See Rock City.”  She composed music for “The Fence,” an independent film which was a recipient of the 2008 UCLA Directors Spotlight Award, and two of her songs have been featured on ABC’s “Men in Trees.”  Holley has released six records, and of her latest, Hush, one blogger wrote “…just plain, unabashed, good quality songs…delightful.”  In 2009, Image Journal featured Holley as April’s artist of the month, and Time Out New York  says, “The slight catch in Holley’s voice can break your heart.”

Holley, along with Kate Campbell, Mary Chapin Carpenter and Caroline Herring, will perform Celebrating Eudora, a tribute concert to famed Southern writer Eudora Welty.  A ticketed fundraising event for the Festival, the concert will take place in historic Trinity United Methodist Church at 8 pm on Saturday, February 6th, 2010.

Tickets are on sale now through the Savannah Box Office.

Concert sponsored by Carolyn Luck, and by John and Stephanie Duttenhaver.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Written in forms that range from haiku to prose, in a voice that veers from incantatory to deadpan, the poetic sequences of Campbell McGrath’s 2008 book Seven Notebooks offer diverse reflections on language and poetry, time and consciousness, civilization and art—to say nothing of bureaucrats, surfboards, and blue margaritas.  His most recent book, Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (Ecco Press, 2009), is an epic poem of the American west.

McGrath’s previous poetry collections are Capitalism, American Noise, Spring Comes to Chicago, Road Atlas, Florida Poems, and Pax Atomica.  McGrath’s poetry has also appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper’s and on the op-ed page of the New York Times, as well as in dozens of literary journals and quarterlies and over forty anthologies.  His awards include MacArthur and Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships, the Kingsley Tufts Prize, as well as a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress.  He has taught at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago, and for the last fifteen years at Florida International University, in Miami, where he is the Philip and Patricia Frost Professor of Creative Writing.
Sponsored by Linda Heasley and Stephen Coady.

When her doctor confined her to bed for the final months of her pregnancy, Mary Alice Monroe’s husband handed her a yellow notepad and pencil and urged her to write the novel she had always dreamed about. Knowing she might never again have that gift of time, she wrote and wrote. “I gave birth to a baby and a book,” says Monroe.

A dozen books later, Mary Alice has found her voice in fiction.  Although known for her intimate portrayals of women’s lives, her writing has gained added purpose and depth with her move to the Low Country.   An active environmentalist, she draws themes for her novels from nature and the parallels with human nature, thus drawing attention to various endangered species and the human connection to the natural world.

Mary Alice is involved with several environmental groups and is on the board of the South Carolina Aquarium.  Her work with these groups provided the inspiration for her novels The Beach House, Skyward, Sweetgrass, Swimming Lessons, her children’s book, Turtle Summer, Time Is a River, and Last Light Over Carolina. She is currently working on her new novel, due out in spring 2011.

Mary Alice has served on the faculty of numerous writer’s conferences and retreats.  Her books have achieved several best seller lists, including SIBA, USA Today, and the New York Times. Her first children’s book received several awards, including the ASPCA Henry Bergh award.  In 2008 Monroe was awarded the SC Center for the Book Award for Fiction.  Her books are sold worldwide.

Sponsored by

James Navé’s career as a poet, storyteller, and explorer spans three decades and has taken him throughout the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa.  He has memorized over 500 poems and holds an MFA in poetry from Vermont College.  He founded and co-directs, with Allegra Huston, The Imaginative Storm Writing Workshops (www.imaginativestorm.com), based in Taos, and he also teaches at the Huston School of Film and Digital Media, a department of the national University of Ireland, Galway.  The slammaster for the biannual Leaf Poetry Slam at the Lake Eden Arts Festival in Asheville and the Verse/Converse Poetry Festival in Taos, Navé was on three national Poetry Slam teams and won a Poetry Slam with a perfect 30 at the Green Mill in Chicago.  Navé produced and directed Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way” Creativity Camp in Taos, NM, and he co-founded Poetry Alive!, a national touring company dedicated to performing classic poetry as theater.  Navé’s poetry has appeared in The North Carolina Literary Review, The Asheville Literary Review, Summit Magazine, Chokecherries, Heartstone Journal, The Dirty Goat, River Oak Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts, Willard and Maple, Red Wheelbarrow, Phoebe, Tightrope, Griffin, South Carolina Review, and Poetry Slam Redux.
Sponsored by Kay and Don Gardner.

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.

Detroiter Gail Perry-Mason is well known in the securities industry, where she has climbed the corporate ladder from receptionist to Senior Director-Investments of Oppenheimer & Co. Inc.  She founded and directed the first Youth Investment Club through the NAIC, along with the original money camp for teens called Money Matters.  This program has instructed over 5,000 youth, both in Detroit and nationally.  Gail writes for national magazines and has co-authored a national bestseller, Girl, Make Your Money Grow!
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Gretchen Peters’ Seeds of Terror: How Heroin is Bankrolling the Taliban and Al Qaedadetails how 70 percent of the Taliban’s funding comes from the drug trade. In a time when America’s policies in Afghanistan are central to defeating our enemies, Peters offers solutions based on changing that war-ravaged country’s economy.
 
Gretchen Peters has covered Pakistan and Afghanistan for more than a decade, first for The Associated Press and later as a reporter for ABC News. Peters was nominated for an Emmy for her coverage of the 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto, and she won the SAJA Journalism Award for a Nightline segment on the former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf. She has worked with leading media outlets including The National Geographic Society, The Christian Science MonitorandThe New Republic, and she has been a commentator on NPR and CNN. She now lives in the US with her husband, Robert Capa Gold Medal-winning photographer John Moore, and their two children.  In fall 2009, she entered the Josef Korbel School of International Studies to pursue a master’s degree in Homeland Securities and Criminal Justice.
Sponsored by Mike and Norma Powers

Jonathan Rabb is the author of the critically acclaimed historical novels Rosa and Shadow and Light, the first two books in a trilogy set in Europe between the wars. The final installment, The Second Son, will be published by Farrar Straus & Giroux early in 2011, after which Rabb will turn his attention to the early 17^th century and Venice. Rabb won the international Dashiell Hammett prize at the Spanish Semana Negra Festival in 2006 for Rosa. Prior to the trilogy, Rabb wrote The Overseer and The Book of Q, and contributed essays and reviews to Opera News and the collection I Wish I’d Been There (Doubleday). He graduated from Yale, and completed his graduate work at Columbia in political theory. His novels have been translated into fifteen languages. He teaches creative writing at both NYU and SCAD. After many years living in New York City, he and his wife and two children recently moved to Savannah, and they couldn’t be happier.
Sponsored by Sally and Henry Minis.

William Rawlings was born, raised and lives in Sandersville, Georgia, home to his family for more than two centuries.  In addition to his five novels in print, including his latest, The Mile High Club, he is a frequent contributor to newspapers and magazines, writing on a wide variety of topics ranging from humor to history.   One consistent theme in his writing is a well-defined sense of place, especially in relation to the landscape of rural Georgia.  Rawlings states, “One of life’s greatest pageants is the continuity of life in small Southern towns.  Characters wander in and out, plying their intrigues and playing their roles, both major and minor.  There’s hardly a need for fiction, as the truth is oftentimes more bizarre.  What more inspiration could a writer ask for?”
Sponsored by Heyward and Patty Gignilliat.

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

Neil Shepard’s most recent book, This Far From the Source (Mid-List Press, 2006), was a Small Press Reviews “Pick of the Month,” and an “Editor’s Choice” by Notre Dame Review. Poems from that collection were also featured on the well-regarded websites Poetry Daily and Verse Daily.  As Eamon Grennan says of the book, “Shepard’s poems range from occasions of public, political concern to moments of the closest private, domestic implication. In mature meditations, in sharply detailed memories, in muscular free verse and lightly worn habits of descriptive verve he manages to make the world his subject.”

Shepard’s second book, I’m Here Because I Lost My Way (1998), offers “essential, elegant poems,” according to Naomi Shihab Nye. And Alice Fulton says of it, “From the bitter stuff of history, the filmy stuff of memory, Neil Shepard makes phoenix poems of resurrection and second chances seized. His work bears brilliant witness in a language free of polemics and rich with the sustenance of art. Few poets understand— or restore— so much.”

The author’s first collection, Scavenging the Country for a Heartbeat, won the 1992 First Book Award for Poetry from Mid-List Press. Hayden Carruth praises in it the “clarity of mind and heart and honesty of technique… To read these poems is an awakening.”

Shepard’s poems and essays have appeared in hundreds of magazines, among them, the AWP Chronicle, Boulevard, Harvard Review, New American Writing, New England Review, North American Review, Paris Review, Shenandoah, Southern Review, and TriQuarterly. He is a long-time professor of creative writing in the BFA Writing Program at Johnson State College in Vermont, where he is Senior Editor of the literary magazine Green Mountains Review. He also teaches in the low-residency MFA Writing Program of Wilkes University (PA), as well as in summer writers’ conferences at the Chautauqua Institute (NY) and New England College (NH). He founded and directed for eight years the writing program at the Vermont Studio Center; and he is a founding member of the poetry-jazz ensemble, PoJazz, whose new CD, Last Days, is available from Digstation.com. Sponsored by Mr. and Mrs. Ib Raae.

Jennifer Thompson was raped at knifepoint by a man who broke into her apartment while she slept.  She was able to escape, and eventually positively identified Ronald Cotton as her attacker.  Ronald insisted that she was mistaken–but Jennifer’s positive identification was the compelling evidence that put him behind bars.  After eleven years, Ronald was allowed to take a DNA test that proved his innocence.  He was released, after serving more than a decade in prison for a crime he never committed.

Two years later, Jennifer and Ronald met face to face–and forged an unlikely friendship that changed both of their lives. In Picking Cotton: Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption, Jennifer and Ronald unfold the harrowing details of their tragedy, and challenge our ideas of memory and judgment while demonstrating the profound nature of human grace and the healing power of forgiveness. The authors received the 2008 Soros Justice Media Fellowship for Picking Cotton.  Thompson-Cannino speaks frequently about the need for judicial reform, and is a member of the North Carolina Actual Innocence Commission, the advisory committee for Active Voices, and the Constitution Project.  Her op-eds have appeared in the New York Times, the Durham-Herald Sun, and the Tallahassee Democrat. Ronald Cotton has spoken at various schools and conferences including Washington and Lee University, University of Nevada Las Vegas, Georgetown Law School, and the Community March for Justice for Troy Anthony Davis in Savannah.

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Dr. Nagueyalti Warren’s recent publications include an edited anthology of poetry by black women from throughout the diaspora, entitled Temba Tupu (Walking Naked) Africana Women’s Poetic Self-Portrait published by Africa World Press; and Margaret by Lotus Press, a persona poem and winner of the 2008 Naomi Madgett Long Poetry Award. A long-time faculty member at Emory University, she recently completed her first novel.

Dr. Warren’s teaching and research specialties include African American literature, women’s fiction, creative writing, poetry, and W. E. B. Du Bois’ contribution to the field of African American Studies, the topic of her dissertation. Her current research projects include a book on the writings of Alice Walker. Dr. Warren’s teaching and research specialties include African American literature, women’s fiction, creative writing, poetry, and W. E. B. Du Bois’ contribution to the field of African American Studies, the topic of her dissertation. Her current research projects include a book on the writings of Alice Walker. Warren is a Cave Canem fellow whose poems have appeared in Essence Magazine, African American Review, The Ringing Ear anthology, The Courtland Review and other anthologies and online journals.

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A 2009 inductee into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, Philip Lee Williams is the author of 14 books, including ten novels and two works of non-fiction. His latest novel, The Campfire Boys, was published Sept. 1, 2009, by Mercer University Press. His books have been translated into Swedish, German, French, and Japanese and have appeared in large-print editions as well. A number of his books have been optioned for film by such people as producer Richard Zanuck, director Ron Howard, and actress Meg Ryan. He was hired by MGM to write the screenplay of his own book, All the Western Stars, though the movie has not yet been made.

Williams has also published poetry in more than 40 magazines, including Poetry, Press, the Cumberland Poetry Review and many others. He has published essays and short stories, and one story, “An Early Snow,” published in 2000, was nominated by The Chattahoochee Review for a Pushcart Prize.

In addition, he is a prize-winning documentary film writer and producer. Three of his films have been shown multiple times on Georgia Public Television, and he has won awards from the New York Film Festival, the Columbus (Ohio) Film Festival, and the Telly Awards. He is a winner of the Townsend Prize for Fiction for his first novel, The Heart of a Distant Forest, and in 1991 he was named Georgia Author of the Year for Fiction.

The University of Georgia has listed Phil as one of its “notable graduates,” and he is the only one on that list who works (or has ever worked) for UGA itself. He is a member of the Graduate Faculty at UGA and director of public information for the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. In 2001 he was named to Who’s Who in America for his literary accomplishments. Philip is a 1972 graduate of the University of Georgia.

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