Tag: books

Andrew Feiler’s book, A Better Life for Their Children, remembers the improbable partnership that empowered a generation of Black students to become poets, civil rights leaders, and Congress members.

I think about deliciousness a lot and have pursued it all my life. Yet, in pandemic times, the pure joy of eating something delicious—preferably a delicious surprise, rather than something I have had to orchestrate myself—has been absent.

In A Night at the Sweet Gum Head, released this month by W.W. Norton, journalist Martin Padgett sutures this context into the accounts of two main subjects: Bill Smith, who helped lead the Georgia Gay Liberation Front, worked as a city commissioner, and published the South’s leading gay newspaper, the Barb; and John Greenwell, who rose to drag stardom performing as Rachel Wells at the Sweet Gum Head nightclub.

For his posthumous memoir, It’s in the Action: Memories of a Nonviolent Warrior, C.T. Vivian, who Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the greatest preacher to ever live,” revisits his seven decades of activism and the life lessons resulting from those strategies toward advancing equality for all people.

Georgia’s literary history is rich with remarkable women writers like Anne Rivers Siddons, Pearl Cleage, Flannery O’Connor, Tayari Jones, and Alice Walker. It’s no surprise that legacy carries into the metro’s brick-and-mortar bookshops.

Jambo Books is a Decatur-based company that introduces children to a more inclusive set of heroes. Each box contains two or three books with main characters who are people of color, with story arcs often centering on self-confidence and empathy.

The Pulitzer-prize winner has written poems about her mother, but to tell a fuller story of her mother’s life and death, Trethewey penned a heart-wrenching, elegiac memoir called Memorial Drive. 

Since 2011, the number of Black students graduating is up 47 percent, the number of students eligible for federal Pell grants earning a degree is up 46 percent, and the number of Latinx graduates is up 89 percent. Such increases were no accidents.

On Monday, Brown was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for The Tradition, and he has been moving nonstop ever since.

Every other year, the Georgia Center for the Book, the Atlanta Writer’s Club, the DeKalb Library Foundation, and Georgia State University Perimeter College’s literary journal the Chattahoochee Review select 10 finalists from works of fiction by Georgia writers.