From the Magazine

Spring is here, and with it, a new selection of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry books to check out. Here are six from Atlanta authors to add to your reading list.

Humble, gritty, and quirky, East Point sits just southwest of downtown Atlanta, bordered by Greenbriar Mall, Camp Creek Parkway, and Tyler Perry Studios. Established in 1847 as the eastern terminus of the Atlanta and West Point railroads, the city was chartered 40 years later, and today is home to 38,000 residents

The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Women challenges regional stereotypes and paints a complex, vivid picture of life in the mountains. Here, a passage Anna Tutt (1911–2008), who was born in Columbia County, Georgia.

Georgia State Representative Park Cannon, whose District 58 slices through the community, says it’s a place “where people of economic opposites and vast social differences are neighbors.”

My childhood at age seven was nothing like my daughter’s now. My world was defined by fire and brimstone belching from the pulpit at Spring River Assembly of God. I didn’t know a Black person, and I sure as hell didn’t know what a lesbian was—much less consider a happy couple as part of my family.

In 2019, then police chief Erika Shields suspended Atlanta Police Department’s chase policy. Her successor, Rodney Bryant, enacted a revised policy less than a year after the original had been suspended. But chases remain controversial.

Dispatches from Atlanta and beyond. Also in this month's edition: Watching the World Cup in Norcross and trans dancers find a home on Cheshire Bridge.

“It’s just getting harder for bees to do what they do,” Keith Delaplane says. Increasingly, honeybees and other pollinators face survival challenges from climate change, pesticide use, and habitat destruction—in addition to bacteria, parasites, and viruses that can swiftly decimate a hive. But researchers like Delaplane, a professor of entomology at the University of Georgia and the director of UGA’s Bee Program, are working to offer beekeepers tools to combat at least some of these threats. Next year, Georgia—home to one of the biggest commercial beekeeping industries in the country—might also be home to the world’s first vaccine for honeybees.

Each of MARTA’s 1,500-odd bus drivers has a unique badge number. The lower the number, the higher a driver’s seniority; a new recruit might be assigned, say, Badge #1480. That makes Coy Dumas Jr., Badge #1—who just celebrated 50 years behind the wheel—something of a transportation sensation.

Doug Elliott, a retired higher-ed executive, sits down to breakfast every morning with a coffee, perhaps some cereal, and Kim Kardashian’s boobs in his face. The billboard sits across from his apartment downtown. It’s one of several new billboards that have been erected in the Arts & Entertainment Atlanta district—an initiative, approved by the city in 2017, to “awaken” downtown by introducing outdoor media displays by local artists as well as advertisers.