NRI PULSE STAFF REPORT
Johns Creek, August 9, 2024: The second annual Johns Creek Literary Fair will be held Sept. 29 with keynote speaker Rick Bragg, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, acclaimed writer, and bestselling author of 11 nonfiction books, including “All Over but the Shoutin’,” and, most recently, “The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People, Lost and Found.”
The free event will feature Bragg in conversation with Brian Panowich, award-winning Georgia-based author of “Nothing but the Bones” and three other novels. They will be joined by numerous local, regional and nationally known writers appearing from noon-5 p.m. at the Mark Burkhalter Amphitheater at Newtown Park.
Festivities will begin with all attendees invited to share lunch with 20 local authors. During something like a game of musical chairs, those writers will move table-to-table, handing out freebies and regaling festivalgoers with details about their books, which will be available for purchase throughout the afternoon, as will food, wine and other beverages.
Next up, a “Legal Eagles with Scribe Vibes” panel will spotlight Atlanta-area attorneys who have penned books, including Deepa Varadarajan, author of “Late Bloomers,” Lo Patrick, whose most recent crime novel is “The Night the River Wept,” Michael L. Thurmond, chief executive officer of DeKalb County and author of “James Oglethorpe, Father of Georgia: A Founder’s Journey from Slave Trader to Abolitionist,” and moderator C. Matthew Smith, author of “Twentymile.”
Additionally, the JCLF will feature children’s authors and crafts led by nonprofit arts groups. Once again, the master of ceremonies will be George Weinstein, executive director of the Atlanta Writers Club. Weinstein has spent decades working with writers throughout metro Atlanta and beyond, including the Appalachian foothills of northeastern Alabama, home to the JCLF’s renowned keynote speaker.
Bragg, lauded as one of the most distinctive, illustrative storytellers in American literature for more than three decades, began his career at newspapers before writing nearly a dozen books and penning columns in magazines including Southern Living and Garden & Gun. His first book, the national bestseller “All Over but the Shoutin’,” has become something of an anthem for the people of the mountain South, and it is that regard, more than any award he has won, he says he holds most dear. The book tells Bragg’s story of being raised by a single mother who worked as a maid and picked cotton to hold her family together. He has often said he climbed up his mother’s backbone to escape the future he seemed predestined to live.
Before getting a job at the Jacksonville News for $50 a week in the 1970s, Bragg ran a chainsaw, swung a pick, drove a dump truck, baled hay, stripped sugar cane and strung barbed wire as a teen. “I took a $100 cut in pay,” he has said about that first newspaper position, “but no one I know has ever been lacerated by barbed wire or knocked out by a falling pine tree while they were searching for a metaphor.
“Everything,” he added, “just seemed pretty easy after that.”
After he dropped out of Jacksonville State University in 1978, he worked his way to the Birmingham News, then on to the St. Petersburg Times. Soon, he garnered a reputation for writing about people in trouble and, in 1992, was awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, where he studied history.
A brief stint at the Los Angeles Times was followed by a job at the New York Times, where, in 1996, Bragg won a Pulitzer Prize for “elegantly written stories on contemporary America.” Many other awards followed, as have seven New York Times bestsellers including “Ava’s Man,” “Prince of Frogtown,” “The Best Cook in the World” and “The Speckled Beauty.”
For nearly 20 years, he has been the Clarence Cason Professor of Writing at the University of Alabama. For the past 10, he has cared for his mother on their farm in Alabama.
“I do the same thing I did 50 years ago,” Bragg has said. “I haul feed and fertilizer, and burn brush, and shoot water moccasins. The only difference is, I have a slightly better pickup truck to do it in.”
Bookmiser will have Bragg’s titles available for purchase and personalization. Books by Panowich, the panel authors and the local and children’s authors will also be for sale throughout the JCLF.
For more information, including author signup details, go to https://johnscreekga.gov/recreation-parks/special-events/literary-fair/.
