Greetings from the Georgia Center for the Book -

Wow, thank you to everyone who attended Revival: Lost Southern Voices (RLSV) 2023, whether virtually on in-person. We had a wonderful weeks of events, and left with very long reading lists. If you missed it, all the sessions were recorded, and they will be available soon.

April is packed here at the Georgia Center for the Book, beginning next week—we have four events! On Monday, Nick Tabor will be in conversation with Anthony Grooms about Nick's book Africatown: America's Last Slave Ship and the Community it Created. With Little Shop of Stories on Tuesday, Rebecca Ross will be discussing her new YA novel Divine Rivals with Isabel Ibañez. Then Thursday, April 6th, we welcome Geraldine Higgins and Marilynn Richtarik to discuss Richtarik's new book Getting to Good Friday: Literature and the Peace Process in Northern Ireland. Finally on Friday, Alex Bracken will be here for her new YA novel, Silver in the Bone, with Brave & Kind Books. Scroll to read more about all of these events and make plans to join us. Please note that our website is currently malfunctioning with our partner events, so is not a reflection of all of the events we have coming up right now. It's being fixed! In the meantime, make sure you're also following Brave & Kind Books, Charis Books & More, and Little Shop of Stories for more events that we have coming up.

We have some other fabulous events in the works! On April 12th, at 7 p.m., join us for an evening with authors Emily Strasser and Hannah Palmer for Strasser's Georgia debut of Half-Life Of A Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History. This event is free and open to the public, but registration here is required. We, along with Charis Books and More, are welcoming V.E. Schwab to First Baptist Church Decatur for the paperback release of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue on April 19th. Tickets for that event are available here. Later this spring, on April 25th, A Cappella Books and Georgia Center for the Book are honored to welcome author Charles Frazier for a discussion of his highly-anticipated new novel, The Trackers in the Decatur Library Auditorium. Registration is open now for that too.

There are new signs with a whole new set of poems on the Arabia Mountain trail, at Glen Lake Park, and on the Michelle Obama Trail for the Georgia Poetry in the Parks project! If you visit the parks and see them, take a photo and tag @gapoetryintheparks on Instagram to let us know.

Have you checked out our 2023 lists of Books All Georgians and Young Georgians Should Read? We hope you find some new books to love! We'll be highlighting one book from each list for every month from now until November in our newsletter and on our website. Scroll for resources and information about this month's featured books.

Revisit our previous virtual programs on our YouTube channel. Visit our Eventbrite page, our website, and follow us on social media (links above) to learn more about our upcoming events.

We'll see you soon!

Ally StoneWright, Program Assistant
and
Joe Davich, Executive Director
The Georgia Center for the Book

Rebecca Ross with Isabel Ibañez
Tuesday, April 4, 2023
7:00 p.m. ET
Decatur Library

Join Little Shop of Stories and us for an evening with Rebecca Ross to discuss her new book Divine Rivals with Isabel Ibañez! This is sure to be a night of hope, heartbreak, warring gods, enemies, lovers, and (as always) wonderful books, so click here to learn more.

About the book: After centuries of sleep, the gods are warring again. But eighteen-year-old Iris Winnow just wants to hold her family together. Her mother is suffering from addiction and her brother is missing from the front lines. Her best bet is to win the columnist promotion at the Oath Gazette. To combat her worries, Iris writes letters to her brother and slips them beneath her wardrobe door, where they vanish—into the hands of Roman Kitt, her cold and handsome rival at the paper. When he anonymously writes Iris back, the two of them forge a connection that will follow Iris all the way to the front lines of battle: for her brother, the fate of mankind, and love.

Rebecca Ross was born and raised in Georgia, where she continues to reside with her husband, her lively Australian Shepherd, and her endless piles of books. She loves coffee, the night sky, chalk art, maps, the mountains, and growing wildflowers in her yard. And a good story, of course. She is the author of The Queen's Rising, The Queen's Resistance, Sisters of Sword and Song, Dreams Lie Beneath, and A River Enchanted.

Isabel Ibañez is the author of Together We Burn (Wednesday Books), and Woven in Moonlight (Page Street), a finalist for the William C. Morris Award, and is listed among Time Magazine’s 100 Best Fantasy Books Of All Time. She is the proud daughter of Bolivian immigrants and has a profound appreciation for history and traveling. She currently lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with her husband, their adorable dog, and a serious collection of books. Say hi on social media at @IsabelWriter09.

Getting to Good Friday
with Marilynn Richtarik

Thursday, April 6, 2023
7:00 p.m. ET
Decatur Library Auditorium

Join the Georgia Center for the Book for an evening with Geraldine Higgins and Marilynn Richtarik as they discuss Getting to Good Friday: Literature and the Peace Process in Northern Ireland. This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.

We will have a limited number of copies of Getting to Good Friday: Literature and the Peace Process in Northern Ireland available for purchase at the event from our friends at Little Shop of Stories. We strongly recommend pre-ordering a copy to be picked up at the event, here.

About Getting To Good Friday: Getting to Good Friday: Literature and the Peace Process in Northern Ireland intertwines literary analysis and narrative history in an accessible account of the shifts in thinking and talking about Northern Ireland’s divided society that brought thirty years of political violence to a close with the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. Drawing on decades of reading, researching, and teaching Northern Irish literature and talking and corresponding with Northern Irish writers, Marilynn Richtarik describes literary reactions and contributions to the peace process during the fifteen years preceding the Agreement and in the immediate post-conflict era. Progress in this period hinged on negotiators’ ability to revise the terms used to discuss the conflict. As poet Michael Longley commented in 1998, ‘In its language the Good Friday Agreement depended on an almost poetic precision and suggestiveness to get its complicated message across.’ Interpreting selected literary works by Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Deirdre Madden, Seamus Deane, Bernard MacLaverty, Colum McCann, and David Park within a detailed historical frame, Richtarik demonstrates the extent to which authors were motivated by a desire both to comment on and to intervene in unfolding political situations. Getting to Good Friday suggests that literature as literature—that is, in its formal properties in addition to anything it might have to ‘say’ about a given subject—can enrich readers’ historical understanding. Through Richtarik’s engaging narrative, creative writing emerges as both the medium of and a metaphor for the peace process itself. Getting to Good Friday: Literature and the Peace Process in Northern Ireland, was recently published in anticipation of the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement in April.

About Marilynn Richtarik: Marilynn Richtarik is a Professor of English at Georgia State University, where she has taught since 1995. Her previous books include Acting Between the Lines: The Field Day Theatre Company and Irish Cultural Politics 1980-1984 (Oxford University Press, 1994), Stewart Parker: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2012), and an edition of Parker’s autobiographical novel Hopdance (The Lilliput Press, 2017). She spent the first half of 2017 teaching at Queen’s University Belfast as a US Fulbright Scholar.

About Geraldine Higgins: Geraldine Higgins is an Associate Professor of English and Director of Irish Studies at Emory University. Originally from Ballymena, Co. Antrim, she has taught at Emory since 1996. She is the curator of the National Library of Ireland’s acclaimed exhibition, “Seamus Heaney: Listen Now Again,” open at the Bank of Ireland cultural center in Dublin which will travel to Atlanta later this year.

Alex Bracken & Silver in the Bone
Friday, April 7, 2023
7:00 p.m. ET
Decatur Library Auditorium

Join Brave & Kind Books and the Georgia Center for the Book for an event with Alex Bracken for her new YA novel Silver in the Bone. This event is free, but registration here is requested.

About the book: Tamsin Lark didn’t ask to be a Hollower. As a mortal with no magical talent, she was never meant to break into ancient crypts, or compete with sorceresses and Cunningfolk for the treasures inside. But after her thieving foster father disappeared without so much as a goodbye, it was the only way to keep herself—and her brother, Cabell—alive. Ten years later, rumors are swirling that her guardian vanished with a powerful ring from Arthurian legend. A run-in with her rival Emrys ignites Tamsin’s hope that the ring could free Cabell from a curse that threatens both of them. But they aren’t the only ones who covet the ring. As word spreads, greedy Hollowers start circling, and many would kill to have it for themselves. While Emrys is the last person Tamsin would choose to partner with, she needs all the help she can get to edge out her competitors in the race for the ring. Together, they dive headfirst into a vipers’ nest of dark magic, exposing a deadly secret with the power to awaken ghosts of the past and shatter her last hope of saving her brother.

Alexandra Bracken was born in Phoenix, Arizona. The daughter of a Star Wars collector, she grew up going to an endless string of Star Wars conventions and toy fairs, which helped spark her imagination and a deep love of reading. After graduating high school, she attended the College of William & Mary in Virginia, where she double majored in English and history. Bracken sold her first book, Brightly Woven, as a senior in college (2010) and was dubbed “a debut writer to watch” by Publishers Weekly. After 6 years working in publishing at Random House Children’s Books, Bracken became a full-time author, going on to establish herself as one of the top YA fantasy authors writing today. Her books have been translated into over 15 languages, and she has created an impressive oeuvre featuring multiple bestselling stories including the Darkest Minds series, the Passenger series, and the middle-grade Prosper Redding series. Her most recent stand-alone, Lore, spent over 40 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was called “a brilliant and breathless twist on classic mythology” by #1 New York Times bestselling author Marissa Meyer (The Lunar Chronicles), cementing Bracken as an unstoppable force when it comes to adapting myths and legends into unique and creative tales. Bracken now lives in Arizona with her tiny pup, Tennyson, in a house that’s overflowing with books. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @alexbracken and visit her at alexandrabracken.com.

March Featured books

Books All Georgians and
Young Georgians Should Read

Our featured adult book for March is Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic, edited by Valerie Boyd. Read a review of the book in the AJC here. This anthology shares the work of 31 Black writers as they reflect on surviving the trials of 2020. Rosalind Bentley presented on her mentor, Valerie Boyd, and discuss Bigger than Bravery at the 2023 Revival: Lost Southern Voices festival. The video will be available soon.

Our featured March book from the Books All Young Georgians Should Read list is Just Like Jesse Owens, by Ambassador Andrew Young, as told to his daughter, Paula Young Shelton. As a boy, Andrew Young learned a vital lesson from his parents when a local chapter of the Nazi party instigated racial unrest in their hometown of New Orleans in the 1930s. While Hitler's teachings promoted White supremacy, Andrew's father, told him that when dealing with the sickness of racism, "Don't get mad, get smart." To drive home this idea, Andrew Young Senior took his family to the local movie house to see a newsreel of track star Jesse Owens racing toward Olympic gold, showing the world that the best way to promote equality is to focus on the finish line. The teaching of his parents, and Jesse Owens' example, would be the guiding principles that shaped Andrew's beliefs in nonviolence and built his foundation as a civil rights leader and advisor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Hear from Paula and the illustrator here.

Check out the full 2023 lists of Books All Georgians and Young Georgians Should Read here.