 |
| The World's finest
authors... |
| Jessica Handler Ellen Hopkins - Internationally Famous Writer for Young Adults Barry Moser - Illustrator, Engraver, Printer and Book Designer Thomas Lynch - Mortician, Poet and Writer Jeff Shaara - Best-selling Author of Historical and Military Fiction Winston Groom - Novelist, Historian and Creator of Forrest Gump Alice Randall - Award-winning Songwriter and Author |
 |
JESSICA
HANDLER |
|
Friday, September
24, 7:00pm |
Invisible Sisters
is Jessica Handler’s powerful tale of coming of age as
the daughter of progressive Jewish parents who moved to Atlanta
to participate in the social-justice movement of the 1960s,
the healthy sister living in the shadow of her siblings’
illnesses, a daughter in a family torn apart by impossible circumstances,
and as a young woman struggling to redefine herself after her
sisters’ deaths.
Invisible Sisters is a memoir of the unforgettable journey that she and her family faced. For more information on Ms. Handler, please visit her website www.jessicahandler.com. In addition to her appearance on September 24th, Ms. Handler is a featured presenter for this year’s Chattahoochee Valley Writer’s Conference. For more information please visit www.chattwriters.org. Presented as part of the VistaCare Hospice Foundation "End-of-life" Lecture Series. Sponsored by the
Chattahoochee Valley Writer’s Conference and the Muscogee
County Friends of Libraries. |
 |
Internationally
Famous Writer for Young Adults ELLEN HOPKINS |
Tuesday, September
28, 7:00pm |
The New York
Time’s best-selling author Ellen Hopkins has been
writing poetry and books for young adults for years. Her first
novel, Crank, was released in 2004 and quickly became
a word-of-mouth sensation, garnering praise from teens and critics
alike. Ellen’s other best selling novels include Burned,
Impulse, Glass, Identical, Tricks,
and the upcoming Fallout, a companion to Crank
and Glass.
For more information, please visit Ms. Hopkin’s website www.ellenhopkins.com. Sponsored by the
Muscogee County Friends of Libraries. |
 |
Illustrator,
Engraver, Printer and
Book Designer BARRY MOSER |
Thursday, November
18, 7:00pm |
The books Barry
Moser has illustrated and/or designed forms a list of over three
hundred titles. That list includes the Arion Press Moby-Dick
and the University of California Press The Divine Comedy
of Dante. Moser's edition of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures
in Wonderland won the National Book Award for design and
illustration in 1983 and prompted the poet John Ashbery writing
in NEWSWEEK (March 1, 1982), to call Moser's work “never
less than dazzling.” Mr. Moser was honored as a “New
England Living Treasure” in 1983 by the New England Artist
Festival. His Jump, Again! The Further
Adventures of Brer Rabbit was named by The New York
Times as one of the “Ten Best Illustrated Children's
Books” of 1987 as well as one of Redbook's Best
Books for Children for that same year. His collaboration with
Cynthia Rylant, Appalachia, The Voices of Sleeping
Birds, won the prestigious Boston Globe-Horn Book Award
in 1991, and his collaboration with Ken Kesey, Big Double
the Bear Meets Little Tricker the Squirrel, was named one
of the best books of 1990–1991 by the International Board
of Books for Young People of Zurich, Switzerland. His collaboration
with his granddaughter, Isabelle Harper, My Dog Rosie
was named a Best of the Year by Parents Magazine in
1994. Whistling Dixie, his collaboration with Marcia
Vaughn was a 1995 ALA Notable Book, as was his collaboration
with Virginia Hamilton, When Birds Could Talk and Bats Could
Sing, in 1997. He has won numerous citations and awards
of merit from Communication Arts Magazine, Bookbuilders
West, The American Association of University Presses, and
The American Institute of Graphic Arts.
His monumental work on the Pennyroyal Caxton Bible (1999) has been the subject of scores of articles in print, television, and radio as well as the subject of a documentary film called A Thief among the Angels. It was also featured in the only one-man exhibit ever to be mounted at the Library of National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. by a living artist. It was exhibited in the summer and autumn of 2000 at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem as part of an exhibit called "The Bible in the Landscape." Please visit his website at www.moser-pennyroyal.com. Sponsored by the
Muscogee County Friends of Libraries. Presented in cooperation
with the Columbus State University Department of Art and the
C.S.U. Friends of Art. |
 |
Mortician,
Poet and Writer THOMAS LYNCH |
|
Poetry Reading |
Both Events: Columbus
Public Library Free Admission - No Tickets Needed Book-signing to Follow Presentation Books will be on Sale |
Thomas Lynch is
the author of three collections of poems and three books of
essays. A book of stories, Apparition & Late Fictions,
and a new collection of poems, Walking Papers, will
be published in 2010.
His work has been the subject of two film documentaries. PBS Frontline's The Undertaking, aired nationwide in 2007, won the 2008 Emmy Award for Arts and Culture Documentary. Cathal Black's film, Learning Gravity, produced for the BBC, was featured at the 2008 Telluride Film Festival and the 6th Traverse City Film Festival in 2009 where it was awarded the Michigan Prize by Michael Moore. Thomas Lynch's essays, poems and stories have appeared in The Atlantic and Granta, The New York Times and Times of London, The New Yorker and Paris Review and elsewhere. He lives in Milford, Michigan where he has been the funeral director since 1974, and in Moveen, Co. Clare, Ireland where he keeps an ancestral cottage. Thomas Lynch is the author
of three collections of poetry: His commentaries have been recorded and broadcast by BBC Radio, RTE in Ireland and NPR. He is the recipient of grants and awards from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Michigan Council for the Arts, The Michigan Library Association, The Writers Voice Project, The National Book Foundation, The Arvon Foundation in Great Britain and The Irish Arts Council. He has read and lectured at universities and literary centers throughout Europe, The United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and across the United States. He is a regular presenter to professional conferences of funeral directors, hospice and medical ethics professionals, clergy, educators and business leaders. He has been an Adjunct Professor in the graduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has appeared on C-SPAN, MSNBC, The Today Show, and the PBS-Bill Moyers Series, "On Our Own Terms." Please visit his website at www.thomaslynch.com. Presented
as part of the VistaCare Hospice Foundation "End-Of-Life"
Lecture Series. |
| The
following presentations by authors Jeff Shaara, Winston Groom and Alice Randall are part of The Chattahoochee Valley Civil War SesquicentennialCommemoration. This commemoration is sponsored by your Chattahoochee Valley Libraries, the Muscogee County Library Foundation, the Muscogee Country Friends of Libraries and the Georgia Humanities Council. |
|
 |
Best-selling Author
of Historical and |
Thursday, March
24, 7:00pm |
''It has to begin
with a book called The Killer Angels,'' says Jeff Shaara,
reflecting upon his career writing best selling novels about
the Civil War and America's other conflicts. His father, Michael
Shaara, wrote the classic Civil War novel The Killer Angels,
which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975 but didn't become a commercial
success until the film Gettysburg, based upon the book,
was released in 1993. Michael Shaara died in 1988, and after
the success of the film Jeff was persuaded to carry on his father's
work and write a prequel (Gods and Generals, l996)
and a sequel (The Last Full Measure, 1998).
Both were big bestsellers, and Gods and Generals won the American Library Association's William Young Boyd Award, no small triumph for a young man with no previous experience as a writer. The trilogy will be reissued by Ballantine Books in time for the sesquicentennial of the Civil War in 2011. Shaara published one other Civil War novel, Gone for Soldiers, which followed many of his characters back to their experiences in the Mexican–American War of the 1840s. He then left the era behind for two novels set during the American Revolution, Rise to Rebellion and The Glorious Cause; a World War I novel, To the Last Man; one nonfiction book, Jeff Shaara's Civil War Battlefields; and, most recently, a trilogy of novels about World War II, The Rising Tide, The Steel Wave, and No Less Than Victory. All nine of his novels have been bestsellers. What sets them apart? Most historical novels use fictitious characters, but Shaara takes you to a real event with the real characters who made that history. ''My first job is to get into the heads of these characters so I'm comfortable putting words in their mouths,'' he has said. He typically reads fifty to seventy books to write each novel, and any letters or diaries he can find. His reward: ''I love to hear that wonderful little phrase, 'I didn't know that.''' Jeff Shaara, a descendant
of Italian immigrants, was born in 1952 in New Brunswick, New
Jersey, grew up in Tallahassee, Florida, and graduated from
Florida State University with a degree in criminology. He started
a rare–coin business when he was sixteen years old, and
eventually became one of the most widely known coin and precious–metal
dealers in Florida, an occupation he gave up when he took on
his father's mantle as a writer. He currently lives in Sarasota. You can learn more about Mr. Shaara at www.jeffshaara.com. This presentation
is part of the Chattahoochee Valley Civil War Sesquicentennial
Commemoration. The commemoration is sponsored by your Chattahoochee
Valley Libraries, the Muscogee County Library Foundation, the
Muscogee County Friends of Libraries and the Georgia Humanities
Council. |
 |
Novelist, Historian
and Creator of |
Thursday, April
14, 7:00pm |
Winston Francis
Groom, Jr., although born in Washington, D.C. was raised in
Mobile, Alabama, the son of a prominent Mobile attorney. He
attended the University of Alabama, and it was there that found
his true passion for writing while editing and writing for the
university humor and literary magazines. Opting for a degree
in English, he chose not to pursue his father’s career
as an attorney, and soon found himself in Vietnam, compliments
of the U.S. Army.
After his tour of duty in the Army, where he attained the rank of Captain, Groom found himself working as a journalist for the Washington Star, covering the political and court beat. Encouraged by the newspaper’s writer-in-residence, Willie Morris, Groom left the newspaper, moved to New York, and began working on his first novel, Better Times That These, published in 1978, a work influenced by his time in Vietnam. He followed this with As Summers Die, published in 1980. In 1983 he co-authored with Duncan Spencer Conversations with the Enemy: The Story of PFC Robert Garwood, in 1983. This was followed in 1984 by the novel Only. While living in New York, Groom made many valuable connections in the literary world, but it was after returning to Alabama in 1986 that his name became a household word with the publication of Forrest Gump and its adaptation for the movie of the same name, starring Tom Hanks in 1994. Subsequent works include Gone
The Sun, 1988, Gumpisms: The Wit and Wisdom of Forrest
Gump and, The Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. Cookbook,
both in 1994, Gump & Co., in 1995, Forrest
Gump: My Favorite Chocolate Recipes: Mama’s Fudge, Cookies,
Cakes and Candies, also in 1995. Shrouds of Glory:
From Atlanta to Nashville: The Last Great Campaign of the Civil
War was also published in 1995. Such a Pretty Girl,
published in 1999, was followed by The Crimson Tide: An
Illustrated History of Football at the University of Alabama
in 2000. More recent works include A Storm in Flanders: The Ypres Salient, 1914-1918, in 2002; 1942, The Year That Tried Men’s Souls, in 2005; and Patriotic Fire: Andrew Jackson and Jean Laffite at the Battle of New Orleans, 2007. His most recent work is Vicksburg, 1863 in 2009. This presentation
is part of the Chattahoochee Valley Civil War Commemoration.
The commemoration is sponsored by your Chattahoochee Valley
Libraries, the Muscogee County Library Foundation, the Muscogee
County Friends of Libraries and the Georgia Humanities Council. |
 |
Aware-Winning Songwriter
and Author |
Thursday, April
28, 7:00pm |
The only African-American
woman ever to write a number one country song, Alice Randall
has had more than twenty songs recorded, including two top ten
records and a top forty.
The author of The Wind Done Gone, an unauthorized parody of the American classic Gone With The Wind, Randall was awarded the Free Spirit Award in 2001, the Literature Award of Excellence by the Memphis Black Writers Conference in 2002, and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in 2002. Randall also wrote Pushkin and the Queen of Spades chronicling the tribulations of an African American professor of Russian literature whose pro football player son plans to marry a Russian lap dancer. Her latest book, Rebel Yell, explores racial irony through a young black couple struggling with their identity. Her work includes the only known recorded country songs to explore the subject of lynching in The Ballad of Sally Ann; mention Aretha Franklin in the same line as Patsy Cline in XXX's and OOO's: An American Girl; and give tribute to both the slave dead and the Confederate dead in I'll Cry for Yours, Will You Cry for Mine? Randall is also a produced screenwriter (a movie of the week for CBS) and has worked on adaptations of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Parting the Waters, and Brer Rabbit. Originally from Detroit, Michigan, Randall grew up in an enclave of Motown populated almost exclusively with refugees from Alabama and then in Washington, DC. She attended Harvard University, from which she graduated in 1981 with an honors degree in English and American literature. In 1983 she moved to Nashville to become a country songwriter. The mother of Caroline Randall
Williams, the great-granddaughter of the Harlem Renaissance
poet Arna Bontemps and the wife of attorney David Ewing, a ninth-generation
resident of Nashville and a great-great-grandson of Prince Albert
Ewing, the first African American to practice law in Tennessee,
Randall lives deeply down south. Please visit her website at www.alicerandall.com. This presentation
is part of the Chattahoochee Valley Civil War Sesquicentennial
Commemoration. The commemoration is sponsored by your Chattahoochee
Valley Libraries, the Muscogee County Library Foundation, the
Muscogee County Friends of Libraries and the Georgia Humanities
Council. |