Tag: books

Creating and imagining better and new worlds is the task of the writer. Especially in the South, stories are our currency, which is why I take heart in the numerous literary events that Atlantans can experience in late summer and early fall. Writing is a vulnerable artform, and it’s important to have spaces for people to connect to each other’s unique life experiences.

When the Decatur Book Festival launched back in 2006, founder Daren Wang remembers thinking that if 10,000 people attended, “we would have hit it out of the park.” More than four times as many showed up. Over the next decade, the festival continued to grow, eventually drawing as many as 80,000 visitors across three days. DBF became not just one of Decatur’s biggest events, but one of the largest independent book festivals in the country, featuring live music, children’s programming, and parades. The agenda in 2021 and 2022 was less ambitious. And when the DBF board announced its decision to cancel the 2023 festival, it wasn’t a complete surprise. So what’s been going on over the last few years—and will the festival return?

Sally Bethea is still getting to know the river she’s devoted much of her life to. Hired as founding director of Chattahoochee Riverkeeper in 1994, she spent 20 years protecting and restoring the neglected waterway. But “being a mom and running a small business, which a nonprofit is, you rush from one thing to another,” she says. “You’re getting big stuff done and moving on.”

Puerto Rican–born author Von Diaz draws connections between her native island and the American South in her recent book Coconuts and Collards.

This chai rabdi lassi pays homage to rich historical and culinary traditions. It embraces the regional love of cream, and the spiced black chai is a nod to its struggle for freedom against colonial rule.

When tragedy turned her world upside down, award-winning author Zoe Fishman did what authors do: she wrote it all down. Fishman was busy raising two small sons with her husband Ronen Shacham when he died unexpectedly in 2017. She and her sons survived the grueling, heart-expanding years that followed with the help of family and a close circle of friends. Through it all, Fishman, author of six books and the 2020 Georgia Author of the Year, kept writing. Her latest novel, The Fun Widow’s Book Tour, is the fruit of that labor; an intimate, memoir-like exploration of loss and widowhood, and an elegy to the community that surrounded her grieving family when they needed it most.

Cookbooks, essays, history, and more.

Miller Union owner and executive chef Steven Satterfield is renowned for his vegetable-forward dishes. He released his first cookbook, entitled Root to Leaf in 2015 and was named the James Beard Foundation’s Best Chef: Southeast two years later. In the last few years, he’s been exploring putting a multicultural spin on vegetables, while evolving his cooking style to include different textures and flavors.

On April 13, the biannual Townsend Prize for Fiction—named for Atlanta magazine’s founding editor, Jim Townsend—was awarded to Sanjena Sathian for her 2021 novel, The Gold Diggers.

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.