AJC Decatur Book Festival

Books galore, and so much more Page 2

Cat in the Hat kicks off childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s stage

Complete schedule of events

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A P U B L I CAT I O N O F A D V E RT I S I N G S P E C I A L S E C T I O N S

Volumes of fun Book festival appeals to many interests THE ATLANTA JOURNALCONSTITUTION DECATUR BOOK FESTIVAL ➤ When: Sept. 1-3 ➤ Where: Decatur Square ➤ What: Panel discussions;

author readings; children’s activities; live music; food, beer and wine; fireworks; and more

➤ Transportation: The Decatur Square is on MARTA’s East line. For more information and details on festival parking, go to www.decaturbookfestival.com.

Political columnist and author Arianna Huffington will deliver the keynote address Friday at Agnes Scott College.

AJC Decatur Book Festival

By Don O’Briant For AJC Decatur Book Festival

T

he inaugural Atlanta JournalConstitution Decatur Book Festival will feature more than 130 authors, including three Pulitzer Prize winners, but it is more than just a literary event. Scheduled for Sept. 1-3 — Labor Day weekend — the festival in historic downtown Decatur Square will offer a variety of activities for the whole family, including lectures and book signings, an antiquarian book show, cooking demonstrations at The Cook’s Warehouse, a children’s parade and storytelling, street vendors and a wine garden. Poetry readings and live musical performances will be held at Java Monkey and Eddie’s Attic. The weekend festival will be capped off with a barbecue and a fireworks display Sunday evening. The focus of the festival is books, however, and the lineup includes a “who’s who” of the literary world reading from their works and discussing the writing process. “Atlanta has long needed a lively, family-friendly book festival,” said Daren Wang, executive director of The AJC Decatur Book Festival. “With the authors we have, DBF is shaping up to be a marquee literary event.” The festival gets under way Friday night at Agnes Scott College with a keynote address by Arianna Huffington, a best-selling author, political pundit and co-founder of the popular Internet blog, The Huffington Post. Other authors scheduled for Saturday and Sunday readings and panels include best-selling mystery writer Michael Connelly; Edward P. Jones, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Known World”; Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain”; Connie May Fowler, author of the Oprah Book Club selection, “Before Women Had Wings”; Touré, hip-hop writer and contributing editor for Rolling Stone and author of “Soul City”; Roy Blount Jr., a Decatur native and author of “Robert E. Lee”; Terry Kay, author of “To

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LEITA COWART/Special

The AJC Decatur Book Festival will spotlight authors representing a range of genres, including fiction, biography, popular culture and children’s/young adult.

Cathleen Falsani, Michael Dance With the White Dog”; Curtis, Laurel Snyder, Dr. Terry Georgia Poet Laureate David Barr and River Jordan are all Bottoms; Melissa Fay Greene, really thoughtful people who Atlanta author of “Praying for engage questions of spirituality Sheetrock”; and award-winning in ways that deepen our underhistorian Catherine Clinton, standing of our existence,” Bell author of “Harriet Tubman.” said. The panel discussions will Bell is also impressed with cover all genres, from mysteries the musicians and authors/ and pop fiction to poetry and history. David Fulmer, Walter Melissa Fay Greene songwriters that Eddie Owen has invited to the stage at Sorrells and Patricia Sprinkle Eddie’s Attic. will discuss murder mysteries “If there were no book festival goin the ATL; Dorothy Benton Frank and ing on, it would be big news to hear Patti Callahan Henry will talk about that John Wesley Harding, Marshall Lowcountry fiction; Clinton, Tom Chapman, Emily Saliers, Tom Kimmel, Chaffin and Erskine Clarke will address Tommy Womack and Ellis Paul were gowriting history in the South; Natasha ing to perform at Eddie’s Attic over the Trethewey, Thomas Lux and Stephen weekend,” Bell said. Corey will comment on poetry in the Plans for the book festival began Peach State; and Lisa Teasley and Tayari three years ago, when Bill Starr moved Jones will discuss emerging voices in to Atlanta from Columbia, S.C., to take African-American fiction. over as executive director of the GeorThomas Bell, program committee chairman, says he is particularly pleased gia Center for the Book in Decatur. “I knew that Atlanta had a terrible with the diversity of the festival, especially with the religious and spiritual au- record of book festivals that were thors scheduled for Sunday afternoon. “Ray Suarez, Dr. Timothy Johnson, ➤ Continued on next page

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➤ Continued from previous page underfunded and underorganized by well-intentioned people,” Starr said. “And Atlanta had suffered in the view of people in the book industry because of that.” Starr, who had helped organize the successful South Carolina Book Festival in 1996, brought up the subject of a similar literary event in Atlanta during lunch with friends in the publishing business. The discussions continued with others, including Wang, editor of Verb: An Audioquarterly (and the book festival executive direcChef Marvin tor), and Marc Woods, author of Fitten, assistant two cookbooks editor of the and host of Chattahoochee “Homeplate” on Review (and a Turner South, will planning comlead a cooking mittee member). demonstration “[We] got Saturday. together and said, ‘Hey, why don’t we put on a show in the barn?’ ” Starr said. So the group hit the pavement in search of funding, landing the support of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “At that point we had instant credibility. People in New York publishing

The festival lineup includes musical performances by author/musician Wesley Stace/John Wesley Harding and Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls. LIZZIE HIMMEL/Special

LEITA COWART/Special

Powder Springs author Joshilyn Jackson poses with her titles, “Between, Georgia” and “gods in Alabama” at a recent AJC Decatur Book Festival luncheon.

began to take us seriously,” Starr said. As plans for the festival took shape, WSB-AM 750, Verb, Lenz Inc., Target, the Georgia Center for the Book and Agnes Scott College signed on as spon-

sors. When Bell began compiling a list of authors for the festival for the program committee, he wanted to send a clear message to the publishing world that Decatur was a city of readers. “I wanted us to showcase the very best that the South has to offer, but I also wanted to show that we were a festival for all the literature of the world. I didn’t just want geographic diversity. I wanted diversity of all kinds, people of all races, many beliefs, all sexual orientations and many artistic viewpoints,” he said. As a result, Bell said, the list of authors include Pulitzer Prize winners, a National Book Award finalist, authors

who have written about the Atlanta race riots of 1906, authors of pageturning beach reads, chefs, musicians, humorists and children’s storytellers. Decatur was chosen as the site for the festival because all the venues are within walking distance of the Square, Wang said, and there are different activities going on at the same time. “If you’re a family with a couple of kids, and Mom wants to hear Dottie Benton Frank read, Dad can take the kids to the children’s stage or go listen to music on the Square. “Then the whole family can enjoy the fireworks show. It’s truly a familyfriendly festival for everyone.”

‘Fear is another word for excitement’ By Don O’Briant For AJC Decatur Book Festival Arianna Huffington is a woman with a gold-plated Rolodex and a talent for changing personalities as easily as an actress changes roles. Once described by a Los Angeles magazine as “the Sir Edmund Hillary of social climbers,” she cut a swath through society on the East and West coasts before marrying multimillionaire Republican U.S. Rep. Michael Huffington in 1986. They divorced in 1994 after he announced that he was gay, but by then Arianna Huffington was the darling of conservatives. She wrote a right-wing newspaper column, supported Georgia U.S. Rep. Newt Gingrich’s agenda when he was speaker of the House and became a television pundit who debated comedian and author Al Franken while lying in bed with him. Then, in the late 1990s, she reinvented herself as a liberal and moved to Los Angeles, where she began hosting fund-raising parties for antipoverty and environmental

MEET THE AUTHOR ➤ Arianna Huffington will speak at 8 p.m. Sept. 1 at Agnes Scott College’s Presser Hall, 141 E. College Ave., Decatur. For more information, go to www.decaturbookfestival .com. causes and attacking conservative Republicans in her newspaper columns and books. The transformation even shocked Franken, who had introduced her on his TV show as the “beautiful but evil Arianna Huffington.” Others, especially the Republicans she had once supported and now denounced, questioned her motives as “opportunistic.” “That’s not true,” the 55year-old Huffington said in a recent telephone interview from Los Angeles. “I’ve written a lot about my transformation. It’s important for people to have the right to change their minds. I was always in favor of gay rights and prochoice. The fundamental change was about the role of government. I finally realized the problems we are having

Arianna Huffington will draw from her recent book, “On Becoming Fearless in Love, Work and Life,” for the keynote address Friday.

are too large without the help of government.” Huffington, meanwhile, is doing her part to focus attention on issues such as poverty, the war on drugs and the war in Iraq with her column and her newly created blog, The Huffington Post (www .huffingtonpost.com), a site that features essays and comments from celebrities such

as Warren Beatty, Norman Mailer and Walter Cronkite as well as ordinary people. The story of how Huffington went from being a shy Greek girl growing up in Athens to an outspoken political activist is as fascinating as a best-selling novel. She credits her strong-willed mother for pushing her to make friends and telling her to never be afraid of failure. Huffington’s mother encouraged her to apply to the University of Cambridge, even though Arianna could barely speak English. When she was accepted, her mother paid for tuition by selling her jewelry and carpets. At Cambridge, Huffington blossomed as her English improved. She joined the debate team and became the third woman named president of the Cambridge Union. At 22, she wrote her first best-seller, “The Female Woman,” an assault on feminism. She has written numerous books since then, including “After Reason,” which called for a spiritual revolution in Western democracies, and biographies of Maria Callas and Pablo Picasso. Her latest book, “On Becoming Fearless in Love, Work and Life” (Little Brown), is a guide to show women how to confront their

fears. It will be the topic of her talk as keynote speaker at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Decatur Book Festival. Huffington expounded on the book, the blog and other subjects.

Q: Why did you write this book? A: I have two teenage daughters, and I began seeing the kind of fears they face, how they are going to be regarded when they speak out. In the book, I tell women how to achieve their dreams and how to silence the inner voice that says, “But what will people think?” The book covers all of the issues women find important — parenting, love, faith, aging, advocacy and work. Q: Have you always been fearless? A: Absolutely not. The book

is very autobiographical. I had a lot of fears — fear of the first time I got up to speak, fear for my children, fear of relationships with men. When I talk about fearlessness, it doesn’t mean absence of fear. It means not letting our fears stop us. Fear is another word for excitement. You’re doing something new. It’s a kind

➤ See HUFFINGTON, page 8

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Inaugural event presents a best-selling lineup By Don O’Briant For AJC Decatur Book Festival

One of the interesting features of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Decatur Book Festival is the diversity of authors. In a weekend of literary events, book lovers can hear poets, storytellers, crime novelists, pop fiction writers, musicians/songwriters, historians, humorists and literary masters, among others. The following is a sample of some of the artists who will be reading and discussing their books.

MARY KAY ANDREWS The author of “Savannah Blues,” “Hissy Fit” and “Little Bitty Lies” is better known to her Decatur fans as Kathy Hogan Trocheck. The former Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter took the Andrews pen name in 2002 (a combination of names from her daughter, Mary Kathleen, and her son Andrew) after writing a series of Callahan Garrity mysteries set in Atlanta. The pseudonym gave her a blank slate, so to speak, and introduced her to a wider audience. “Writing under a new name was a gamble,” Andrews said, “but it paid off. ‘Savannah Blues’ ” outsold any of my Callahan mysteries.” After spending three years in Raleigh, she recently returned to Avondale Estates to live. “The Decatur Book Festival is my homecoming,” said Andrews, who will talk about her current novel,

➤ Continued on next page

➤ Continued from previous page

CATHERINE CLINTON

EDWARD P. JONES

TOURÉ

“Savannah Breeze,” which follows the further adventures of the characters in “Savannah Blues,” and “Blue Christmas,” a novella set in Savannah. “I’ll also talk about writing in the South — home and what it means to me and to my characters.”

Catherine Clinton relishes challenging subjects. When she began her biography of Harriet Tubman, she knew that her subject was illiterate and that written records of the Underground Railroad heroine would be scarce. But she eventually turned up documents from people on the margins of history that shed new light on the subject. Critics praised “Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom,” and the biography was named one of the best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune and Christian Science Monitor. Born in Seattle, Clinton graduated from Harvard University with degrees in sociology and African-American studies. Her first book was “The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South. Other books have included “Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars” and “Southern Families at War: Loyalty and Conflict in the Civil War South.” Now she is at work on the life story of Mary Todd Lincoln, the much-maligned First Lady. “She was a prominent character in the melodrama of the Civil War,” Clinton said, “but biographers have dismissed her with a few paragraphs and described her as crazy and alcoholic. I want to see if I could strike a balance with the events of her life.”

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Known World” earned his master’s of fine arts at the University of Virginia and began his writing career working for a tax newsletter. He continued to work at honing his fiction, however, and his first collection of short stories, “Lost in the City” (1992) won the prestigious PEN/Hemingway Award. Eleven years later, “The Known World,” a fictional examination of black slave owners, was published to critical acclaim, winning the Pulitzer, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Lannan Literary Award. In 2004, he was named a MacArthur fellow, but none of the prizes and monetary awards has changed his life, he said. “I still don’t have a car or a driver’s license, but I had to get a government ID card so I could get on planes.” In his new collection of short stories, “All Aunt Hagar’s Children,” Jones writes about a wide range of characters in Washington, D.C., from dishwashers and doctors to nurses, murderers and whores. All of these characters emerge from his imagination, Jones said. “I don’t do research, I don’t take notes, and I don’t use family and friends. That’s cheating. People underestimate what the imagination can do.”

As a correspondent for Rolling Stone magazine, Touré has covered Eminem, 50 Cent, Prince, Al Sharpton, Jay-Z and other top names in pop music, politics and hip-hop. He is now a correspondent for Black Entertainment Television whose writing has appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times. His latest book is “Never Drank the Kool-Aid,” a collection of magazine pieces chronicling his journey through American culture that includes a shopping trip with Kanye West, a night of thousand-dollar poker with Jay-Z and playing basketball with Prince. While hip-hop has been an urban American phenomenon, Touré sees its future as more international. “All of black America has had its say within the voice of hip-hop,” he said. “Now, the rest of the world will have an impact on American culture. It could come out of London or Tokyo or Rio or some other international city.” Touré expects the record industry to change drastically as well. “You’re probably not going to see the end of CDs. That’s a lame way of buying records for people over 30. A lot of kids under 15 don’t even deal with albums. There’s going to be a complete shift in how artists relate to the audience. Instead of doing one CD, maybe an artist will release three MP3s every couple of months.”

ROBERT OLEN BUTLER Robert Olen Butler brings a whole new meaning to the term “short fiction’ in his latest work. All of the stories in “Severance” are exactly 240 words long. “I got the idea when I read an opinion by a 19th century French doctor that the human head remains conscious for one minute and a half after decapitation,” said Butler, director of the Florida State University creative writing program and winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for “A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain.” Then he read a passage in “A Sourcebook of Speech” by Dr. Emily Reasoner, surmising that, in a heightened state of emotion, we speak at the rate of 160 words per minute. As a result, Butler imagines the last words of John the Baptist, Nicole Brown Simpson, Medusa, Robespierre, other historical and mythical characters, and even himself after being decapitated on the job in 2008. Butler, who is married to author Elizabeth Dewberry, emphasizes that “Severance” is definitely a work of fiction.

➤ For more information on these and other featured authors, go to

www.decaturbookfestival.com.

In a city that reads, a book festival was bound to happen By Ray Glier For AJC Decatur Book Festival When Daren Wang and a group of literary friends started rallying support for a book festival in Decatur, he couldn’t imagine what it would have been like to pull off the event in another city. “People in other communities might say, ‘Great idea, but what am I going to get out of it?’ ” said Wang, executive director of the festival. “[But] people in Decatur said, ‘Great idea. What can I do to help?’ ” Wang gathered about a dozen people in the Decatur Library early last year. And since Decatur is home to authors, journalists, bookstore owners and many others with literary backgrounds (Wang is editor/publisher of Verb: An Audioquarterly), the group swarmed over the idea. “A lot of people who were at the table already had relationships with authors, so we went to New York to see the

top publishers, and we said, ‘We have these people. Who can you bring us? Who is on tour?’ ” Wang said. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Decatur Book Festival during Labor Day weekend is the product of that collaboration. The festival on Decatur Square will feature more than 100 authors and myriad events for children and adults. Wang said having the backing of the AJC was instrumental in getting publishing houses to make their authors available. “The Los Angeles Times sponsors a book festival in L.A., and it means a lot to publishers when the biggest newspaper in the city gives its support,” he said. Linda Harris, Decatur’s assistant director for community and economic development, met with book festival organizers and city officials at a local restaurant. The city immediately got behind the idea. “We were able to deal with

The Old Courthouse on Decatur Square will serve as a backdrop to some of The AJC Decatur Book Festival activities during Labor Day weekend.

them very quickly and meet with all the interested parties easily,” Wang said. “To replicate what we did with city officials in Decatur would have been difficult in [bigger cities].” It’s not hard to see how Decatur could pull off such a festival. The city has a reputation for staging some of the best community events in metro Atlanta, including the Wine Tasting Festival, Concerts on the Square and the Decatur Arts Festival. There is always a supply of volunteers, not to mention a MARTA sta-

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Maurice Cook works on a painting at the 2004 Decatur Arts Festival. The festival is one of the city’s most popular summer events. File

tion that empties under the pedestrian-friendly Square. But the most important factor in getting support for the book festival was the city’s cultural atmosphere, Harris said. “Our community and our residents are interested in

a festival like this because it appeals to smart, creative people, which Decatur has a big demographic of with our colleges, all of our small businesses, architects and creative businesses,” Harris said. “It is a festival that fits with our community.”

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