CONTACT: Executive Director Robin Gold at 912.598.4040 or info@savannahbookfestival.org

(SAVANNAH, GA) The 2013-2014 Savannah Book Festival has elected Ann Higbee president and Jack Romanos chairman. Higbee, who was re-elected to the Book Festival Board for a three-year term, was formerly managing partner of the public relations/public affairs practice of Eric Mower and Associates. Last year, she served as Savannah Book Festival vice president, responsible for the Festival’s LITERATI support program. Romanos, also re-elected for a three-year Board term, is the former chief executive officer of Simon & Schuster Publishing Co. Newly-elected Board members, who will serve until April 2016, include Jane Anspach, Amy Condon, digital editor of Savannah Magazine, Stephanie Duttenhaver, who served as president of Savannah Book Festival for the past three years, Scott Lauretti and Stratton Leopold. Other officers for the 2013-2014 Savannah Book Festival are Will Holland, treasurer, Ben Oxnard, assistant treasurer, and Jenny Long, secretary. In an April 30 election by current Board members, Board terms were renewed for one year, until April 2014,for Cindy Edwards, Steve Green, Alice Jepson, Ben Oxnard and Don Sturtz. Terms were renewed for two years, until April 2015, for Libba Anderson, Will Holland and Mark Murphy. Jeff Tucker, CPA, remains ex officio member and Robin Gold continues in her non-elected position as executive director.

Gold said, “The new and standing members of the Board bring extraordinary talent, knowledge and skill to the Savannah Book Festival. Their involvement will help make the 2014 Festival a huge success.”

The Savannah Book Festival Inc. is an independent, non-profit corporation led by a volunteer Board of Directors. It is committed to celebrating the written word and to offering all main day events free and open to the public. For more information, please contact Executive Director Robin Gold at 912.598.4040 or info@savannahbookfestival.org.

Tickets are $50 for the luncheon, and include a paperback copy of Quindlen’s recent memoir, Lots of Candles Plenty of Cake. Tickets go on sale April 15 for the general public. More information is available online at www.savannahbookfestival.org or by calling 912.598.4040.

Stephanie Duttenhaver, president of the Savannah Book Festival, said, “Our goal is to keep the momentum of the Book Festival going throughout the year. We will start off the spring with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert K. Massie. Anna Quindlen is an equally impressive follow-up. C-SPAN has called us one of the top book festivals in the country, and our ability to attract authors of this quality is part of the reason why.”

The Savannah Book Festival Inc. is an independent, non-profit corporation led by a volunteer board of directors. It is committed to celebrating the written word and to offering all main day events free and open to the public. For more information, please contact Executive Director Robin Gold at 912.598.4040, info@savannahbookfestival.org.

Tickets for the Massie event are $75 and go on sale March 11 for Savannah Book Festival LITERATI members and sponsors and March 18 for the general public. More information is available online at www.savannahbookfestival.org or by calling 912.598.4040.

Stephanie Duttenhaver, president of the Savannah Book Festival, said, “We want to continue the momentum of the Book Festival throughout the year. Kicking off the spring with a Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times best-selling author of Massie’s caliber is an ideal way to do that. It demonstrates why C-SPAN has called us one of the top book festivals in the country.”

The Savannah Book Festival Inc. is an independent, non-profit corporation led by a volunteer board of directors. It is committed to celebrating the written word and to offering all main day events free and open to the public. For more information, please contact Executive Director Robin Gold at 912.598.4040, info@savannahbookfestival.org or visit www.savannahbookfestival.org.

Please join us for these continuations of SBF’s celebration of the written word.

Robert K. Massie

April 30 marks the date for Dinner and Discussion with Robert K. Massie, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Peter the Great, Nicholas and Alexandra, and The Romanovs as well as other historical nonfiction. He will be focusing on his 2011 book, Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman—another masterpiece of narrative biography. Born Sophia Augusta Frederika in Stettin, Germany in 1729, this obscure German princess traveled to Russia at age 14 and rose to become one of the most remarkable, powerful and captivating women in history. For 34 years, the government, foreign policy, cultural development and welfare of the Russian people were in Catherine’s hands. She dealt with domestic rebellion, foreign wars and political change that included the violence of the French Revolution and its threat to the divine right of royalty and the aristocracy to all the crowned heads in Europe.

Catherine the Great has received the 2012 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the 2012 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography.

“What Catherine the Great offers is a great story in the hands of a master storyteller.”
The Wall Street Journal

Robert Massie, born in Lexington Kentucky, spent much of his youth in Nashville, Tennessee and currently lives in Irvington, New York. He studied U.S. and European history at Yale and Oxford University respectively and was a journalist for Newsweek and the Saturday Evening Post. His breakthrough novel, Nicholas and Alexandra, a biography of Nicholas II and Alexandra, the last emperor and empress of Russia was published in 1967. Massie’s interest in the Imperial Family was triggered by the birth of his own son who was born with Hemophilia, a hereditary disease that also afflicted Nicholas’s son, Aleksey Nikolaevich.

In 1971, Nicholas and Alexandra was made into a film that won several Academy Awards and was nominated for Best Picture. Massey updated the book Nicholas and Alexandra in 1995 with The Romanovs: The Final Chapter which contained newly discovered information. (In 1991, nine skeletons were exhumed from a shallow mass grave near Ekaterinburg, Siberia where Nicholas and his family had been murdered in 1918.)

In 1982, Massie won the Pulitzer Prize for Peter the Great: His Life and World. This book inspired an NBC miniseries that won three Emmy Awards.

Robert Massie was president of the Authors Guild from 1987-1991. While president of the Guild, he famously called for authors to boycott any store refusing to carry Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.

Dinner and Discussion with Robert K. Massie

Date: Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Time: 6:00 p.m.
Venue: Plantation Ballroom, The Landings Club
Cost: Tickets are $75 per person
Q & A and book signing will follow the Dinner and Discussion.
This event is generously sponsored by Wendy’s of Savannah.

Tickets will go on sale March 11, 2013 for LITERATI and Sponsors; March 18, 2013 for the general public. Payment is due at the time of reservation. All tickets are non-refundable, but are transferable.

Reservations can be made online at http://www.savannahbookfestival.org or by mailing a check* to:
Savannah Book Festival
One Diamond Causeway, Ste. 21-331
Savannah, GA 31406-7436
*Please note “Massie Dinner” in the memo area of your check.

Anna Quindlen

Pulitzer Prize winner Anna Quindlen is a novelist and journalist whose work has appeared on fiction, nonfiction and self-help bestseller lists. At the Lunch and Conversation event on May 16, Quindlen will highlight her 2012 memoir, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake. At age 60, she writes about looking back and ahead—considering marriage, girlfriends, our bodies and parenting. She cheers us with the idea that the wisdom may well accompany age, offsetting the downsides. In her wise chapter on girlfriends, she writes, “Perhaps only when we’ve made our peace with our own selves can we really be the kind of friends who listen, advise, but don’t judge, or not too harshly.” (It is also in this section that she shares that she was expelled from boarding school.)

A letter from a reader viewed on Quindlen’s website says, “Some people have a gift for expression, and among those who do, Anna Quindlen stands out as one of the best. Almost every time I read one of her columns, I have the feeling that she has climbed into my head, pulled out my jumbled thoughts and rearranged them onto the page so that they make sense.”

Quindlen was a columnist at The New York Times from 1981 to 1994. In 1990 she became only the third woman in the paper’s history to write a regular column for its Op-Ed page. In 1992, Quindlen won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. A collection of her columns, Thinking Out Loud, was published by Random House in 1993. In 1995 Quindlen left the world of newspapers, which she had joined as a copy girl at age 18, to become a novelist full-time. She has written four bestselling novels: Object Lessons (1991), One True Thing (1994), Black and Blue (1998) and Blessings (2002). One True Thing, Black and Blue and Blessings have each been made into movies.

With the release of A Short Guide to a Happy Life in 2000, Quindlen became the first writer ever to have books appear on the fiction, nonfiction, and self-help New York Times Best Seller lists. The book sold close to a million copies. Quindlen is a graduate of Barnard College and currently lives in New York City.

Lunch and Conversation with Anna Quinlen

Date: Thursday, May 16
Time: 12 noon
Venue: Plantation Ballroom, The Landings Club
Cost: Tickets are $50 per person and include lunch and a paperback copy of Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake
Q & A and book signing will follow the Lunch and Conversation.
This event is generously sponsored by One-Stop Remodeling and Marilyn Brady.

Tickets will go on sale April 8, 2013 for LITERATI and Sponsors; April 15, 2013 for the general public. Payment is due at the time of reservations. All tickets are non-refundable but are transferable.

Reservations can be made online at http://www.savannahbookfestival.org or by mailing a check* to:
Savannah Book Festival
One Diamond Causeway, Ste. 21-331
Savannah, GA 31406-7436
*Please note “Quindlen Luncheon” in the memo area of your check.

“Our goal is to keep the momentum of the Savannah Book Festival going throughout the year,” said Board President Stephanie Duttenhaver. “Last year our spring event with Geraldine Brooks was a huge success–and this year we are thrilled to have two more Pulitzer Prize winners.”

Be sure to check out the SBF website at www.savannahbookfestival.org. Detailed information regarding the Massie and Quindlen events is available. And, you can view great photos from Festival 2013. Volunteer photographers, led by Fed Langley, have captured many terrific Festival moments.

Don’t miss a visit to www.savannahmagazine.com for in-depth author interviews. In one of many, Savannah magazine Editor Annabelle Carr and her 11-year-old son, Santo, sat down with Jeff Kinney and gleaned some great Wimpy Kid nuggets.

Whether you did or didn’t see Garry Wills on Festival Saturday, you might enjoy his March 3 New York Times Book Review interview and expanded version available at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/books/review/garry-wills-by-the-book.html?_r=0.

Festival closing speaker David Baldacci recently debuted “Decoding History” on Public Television. It is a virtual field trip in which Baldacci takes students and teachers into the belly of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. It is being billed as a behind-the-scenes look at the precious artifacts that tell the story of our nation’s history and can be accessed at scholastic.com/decodinghistory. Baldacci brings museum artifacts and their stories to life in his The 39 Clues Cahills vs. Vespers series for young readers.

To continue the luxury of Lose Yourself in Books, you might want to consider a road trip on the Southern Literary Trail to visit writers’ homes and museums. The Southern Literary Trail website offers information on literary destinations in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi.

Jane Fishman’s recent column, “Savannah Book Festival proves Savannah still loves to read,” says it for all of us, “So many books, so little time.” LITERATI membership information may be accessed at www.savannahbookfestival.org/sponsor/.

The Savannah Book Festival Inc. is an independent, non-profit corporation led by a volunteer board of directors. It is committed to celebrating the written word and to offering all main day events free and open to the public. For more information, please contact Executive Director Robin Gold at 912.598.4040, info@savannahbookfestival.org or visit www.savannahbookfestival.org.