The New Georgia Encyclopedia is supported by funding from A More Perfect Union, a special initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Award-winning author and Poet Laureate of Georgia Chelsea Rathburn has served as an ambassador for the literary arts at events across the state. Since 2019, Rathburn has taught creative writing at Mercer University in Macon and continues to work actively in Georgia's literary community.
From Chelsea Rathburn
In her third collection of poems, Still Life with Mother and Knife (2019), Chelsea Rathburn navigates themes of women's sexuality, mental health, and healing from adolescence to adulthood. The collection was named one of the "Books All Georgians Should Read" by the Georgia Center for the Book and received the 2020 Eric Hoffer Book Award in Poetry.
From Chelsea Rathburn
Chelsea Rathburn's second book, A Raft of Grief (2013), was awarded the 2012 Autumn Press Poetry Prize. In this collection, Rathburn abandons iambics and rhyme in her exploration of personal themes such as marital dysfunction, alcoholism, self-reclamation, and love.
From Chelsea Rathburn
William Walsh's award-winning book of poetry, Fly Fishing in Times Square (2020), centers on themes of place and memory as the speaker seeks to reconcile their past and present.
Courtesy of William Walsh
Author, professor, and editor William Walsh is known for his work as a southern narrative poet and as an interviewer of contemporary authors.
Courtesy of William Walsh
William Walsh's second book, Lost in the White Ruins (2014), examines childhood, regrets of loss, and the search "to find what makes us whole."
Courtesy of William Walsh
William Walsh's first novel, Lakewood, was published in 2022.
Courtesy of William Walsh
Environmental concerns figure prominently in the work of Georgia author Taylor Brown.
Photograph by Benjamin Galland
Taylor Brown's first novel, Fallen Land (2016), follows two youths as they travel from Virginia to the Georgia coast during the Civil War.
St. Martin's Press
Taylor Brown's fourth novel, Pride of Eden (2020), takes place in an animal sanctuary on the Georgia coast and explores the plight of wild animals in the modern world.
St. Martin's Press
Alice Friman entered the Georgia literary scene in 2001 when she read her work for the Georgia Poetry Circuit. A prolific and accomplished writer, she has earned numerous awards including the Pushcart Prize and the Ezra Pound Poetry Award.
Photograph by Lillian Elaine Wilson
In her book The View From Saturn: Poems (2014), Alice Friman explores loss, existentialism, and the natural world.
Poet and Bozart Press publisher Ernest Hartsock was an important figure in Atlanta's literary community during the 1920s.
Courtesy of Philip Weltner Library, Oglethorpe University.
Shay Younblood is pictured at a Yaddo artist residency in Saratoga Springs, New York. A graduate of Clark College (later Clark Atlanta University), Youngblood has received numerous honors, including a Pushcart Prize, a Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award, and several NAACP Theater Awards.
Courtesy of Shay Youngblood, Photograph by Carol Bullard.
Shay Youngblood, from Columbus, writes novels, plays, and shorts stories that center on the lives of Black women. Her plays have been staged in theaters across the country, including numerous productions in Atlanta.
Courtesy of Shay Youngblood, Photograph by Miriam Phields.
Lauren Gunderson, from Decatur, is one of the most produced playwrights in the United States. Atlanta's Essential Theatre produced her first play when she was still in high school.
Anya Krugovoy Silver, a poet and longtime professor at Mercer University, was the author of four collections of poetry. She was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2018.
Photograph from Mercer University
Silver's second book, I Watched You Disappear (2014), won the Georgia Author of the Year award for poetry.
Michael Bishop was named to the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2018.
Like many of Bishop's works, the 1985 novel Ancient of Days is set in Georgia.
The Secret Ascension: Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas (1987) imagines a parallel universe in which President Richard Nixon, serving his fourth term, has turned the country into a totalitarian police state.
Augusta native Frank Yerby came to be known as "king of the costume novel" for his successful works of historical fiction.
Courtesy of Digital Library of Georgia, Georgia Historic Newspapers.
Sue Monk Kidd is the author of multiple novels, including The Secret Life of Bees and The Invention of Wings.
This portrait was published with the Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave. The book, the first slave narrative printed in the U.S., was first published in New York City in 1825.
Photograph from Dwight C. Kilbourne, The Bench and Bar of Litchfield County, Connecticut, 1709-1909: Biographical Sketches of Members, History and Catalogue of the Litchfield Law School Historical Notes
This map of Savannah River-area rice plantations was created in 1825, the same year William Grimes first published his narrative in New York City. Grimes served six enslavers in Savannah between 1811 and 1815 before escaping to freedom in New England.
Chatham County Map Portfolio, compiled by workers of the Writers program of the Works Projects Administration in the State of Georgia. Sponsored by the Georgia Society of the Colonial Dames of America.
Carlotta O'Neill, the wife of playwright Eugene O'Neill, stands outside Casa Genotta, their home on Sea Island. The O'Neills built the house in 1932 and lived there until 1936.
Courtesy of National Park Service
Eugene O'Neill, a prominent playwright, and his wife, Carlotta, are pictured in a portrait by Carl Van Vechten in September 1933. In 1932 the O'Neills built a new home, Casa Genotta, on Sea Island and lived there until 1936. O'Neill wrote several plays during their residence, including his only comedy, Ah Wilderness!, and the first draft of A Touch of the Poet.
Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Photograph by Carl Van Vechten.
In this photograph, taken by George N. Barnard, Union general William T. Sherman sits astride his horse at Federal Fort No. 7 in Atlanta. Sherman's Atlanta campaign, which lasted through the spring and summer of 1864, resulted in the fall of the city on September 2.
Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Photograph by George N. Barnard, #LC-DIG-cwpb-03628.
Five enslaved people are pictured at Turnwold Plantation, the Eatonton estate of Joseph Addison Turner. Writer Joel Chandler Harris, who lived at Turnwold during the Civil War, drew upon his experiences there to write his Uncle Remus tales, as well as his autobiographical novel On the Plantation.
Margaret Mitchell's epic Civil War love story, Gone With the Wind, was published in June 1936. Mitchell was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the novel in May 1937.
Courtesy of Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Philip Lee Williams, a native of Madison, won the 2004 Michael Shaara Prize for Civil War Fiction for his novel A Distant Flame (2004). The novel chronicles the experiences of protagonist Charlie Merrill before, during, and after the Atlanta campaign of 1864.
Southern Poetry Review, one of the oldest literary journals in the Southeast, was founded in Florida in 1958 and has been based at Armstrong State University in Savannah since 2002. Pictured is the cover of the journal's fall 2006 issue, featuring a photograph by Dave Beckerman entitled The Secret Garden.
Title page of the original edition of Macaria; or, Altars of Sacrifice, a novel by Columbus native Augusta Jane Evans. Published in 1864, during the Civil War, the novel was sympathetic to the Confederate cause and redefined the roles available to Southern women during the war.
From Documenting the American South, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries
Augusta Jane Evans Wilson wrote nine novels that were among the most popular fiction in nineteenth-century America. Her most successful novel, St. Elmo (1866), sold a million copies within four months of its appearance and remained in print well into the twentieth century.
Courtesy of State Archives of Alabama
Augusta Jane Evans, a native of Columbus, published Macaria; or, Altars of Sacrifice, in 1864, during the Civil War. In 1992 historian Drew Gilpin Faust edited a new edition of the text, restoring passages that had been dropped from reissues of the narrative.
Turnwold Plantation in Eatonton was the home of Joseph Addison Turner, who published a Confederate newspaper called The Countryman during the Civil War. It is also the setting of On the Plantation, a fictionalized account by Joel Chandler Harris of his experiences as a young typesetter at Turnwold.
Courtesy of Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia, #
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Julian Harris, editor and co-owner, with his wife, Julia, of the Columbus Enquirer-Sun, reads mail at his desk in the late 1920s. Harris, the son of Georgia folklorist Joel Chandler Harris, and his wife jointly won a Pulitzer Prize in 1926 for their reporting in the Enquirer-Sun on state officials with ties to the Ku Klux Klan.
Courtesy of Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia, #
ful0939-85.
Natasha Trethewey, a graduate of the University of Georgia and professor at Emory University, won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third collection of poems, Native Guard (2006).
Journalist Ralph McGill won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1959. As editor and publisher of the Atlanta Constitution, McGill broke the code of silence on the subject of segregation.
Courtesy of Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Mike Luckovich, a native of Seattle, Washington, became the editorial cartoonist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1989. Luckovich has twice won the Pulitzer Prize, in 1995 and 2006, for his nationally syndicated work.
Courtesy of Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The main library at the University of Georgia is located on the historic north campus. UGA's library system contains more than 3.9 million volumes, making it the largest academic library in Georgia. The library is also home to the University of Georgia Press.
Photograph from Zlatko Unger
The University of Georgia Press, founded in 1938, produced its first catalog of books in 1940. At that time the press had published eight books, including its first title, Segments of Southern Thought, by Edd Winfield Parks, and its first volume of poetry, Marguerite, the Sister and Wife of Kings, by Rae S. Neely.
Courtesy of University of Georgia Press
Shoppers browse books at the Leed's Books display at the Decatur Book Festival in 2011.
Image from TimothyJ
Marian McCamy Sims, a fiction writer, was a native of Dalton and an alumnae of Agnes Scott College in Decatur. Her novels and short stories, written in North Carolina during the 1930s and 1940s, focus primarily on the lives of white, middle-class southerners.
Reprinted by permission of University of North Carolina at Charlotte Library, Marian McCamy Sims Papers.
The family home of writer Marian McCamy Sims, pictured circa 1921, was built in Dalton around 1918. Originally located on South Thornton Avenue, the house was later moved to another site.
Courtesy of Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia, #
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Natasha Trethewey was named poet laureate of the United States in 2012. A native of Mississippi, Trethewey graduated from the University of Georgia in 1989. Her third volume of poetry, Native Guard, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007.
Courtesy of Emory University
Poet Natasha Trethewey signs books following a reading at the University of Georgia on January 16, 2008. Trethewey read selections from Native Guard, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2007.
Photograph by Sarah E. McKee, New Georgia Encyclopedia
Domestic Work (2000), by Natasha Trethewey, was selected by former U.S. poet laureate Rita Dove to be the first winner of the Cave Canem Prize, awarded each year to the best first collection of poems by an African American poet.
Eliza Frances Andrews (pictured ca. 1879) was a writer of journals, novels, newspaper reports, botany articles and textbooks, and editorials. Her published diary, War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl, 1864-1865, is one of the most compelling first-person accounts of the Civil War home front.
Courtesy of University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Lupton Library Special Collections
Image of Eliza Frances Andrews in the War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl, 1864-1865, one of the most compelling first-person accounts of the Civil War (1861-65) home front, published in 1908. Eliza Frances Andrews was a writer, newspaper reporter, editor, columnist, social critic, scientist, and educator. By the time of her death in 1931 in Rome, Georgia, Andrews had written three novels, more than a dozen scientific articles on botany, two internationally recognized botany textbooks, and dozens of articles, commentaries, and reports on topics ranging from politics to environmental issues.
Image from The War Time Journal of a Georgia Girl (1908)
The Georgia Writers Association, founded by volunteers in 1994, supports and encourages literary efforts in the state by educating writers about the publishing industry, promoting the works of writers to the public, and sponsoring events. The organization also publishes a bimonthly journal, Georgia Writers News/Mag.
Courtesy of Georgia Writers Association
Anthony Grooms is the author of a collection of poetry, Ice Poems (1988), a collection of stories, Trouble No More (1995), and two novels, Bombingham (2001) and The Vain Conversation (2018).
Photograph by J. D. Scott
Founded by poet and novelist David Bottoms and fiction writer Pam Durban, Five Points printed their first issue in the fall of 1996.
Poet Alfred Corn's collection Contradictions was published in 2002 by Copper Canyon Press. Corn, born in Bainbridge, has published several collections of poetry as well as essays, translations, and other writings.
Poet Turner Cassity, a Mississippi native, worked for nearly thirty years as a librarian at Emory University's Robert W. Woodruff Library. Cassity's verse tends toward the New Formalist school and offers a broad interpretation of modern "southernness."
Tayari Jones, an Atlanta native, writes short stories, articles, and novels, many of which focus on African American life in her hometown after the civil rights movement. A graduate of Spelman College, Jones has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the Corporation of Yaddo, among others.
Photograph by Richard Powers
Leaving Atlanta, the debut novel of Atlanta native Tayari Jones, chronicles the child murders of 1979-81 in Atlanta's Black community. Told from the perspective of three elementary school children, the novel received several awards and honors, including the Lillian Smith Book Award in 2005.
The Untelling, published in 2005, is the second novel by Atlanta native Tayari Jones. Through a narrative focusing on a young African American woman's work among the poor in Atlanta, Jones explores the changing dynamics of race, class, and gender in the urban South.
Coleman Barks, professor emeritus of literature at the University of Georgia, is renowned both for his translations of the thirteenth-century poet Rumi and for his own verse.
Courtesy of University of Georgia Photographic Services
The author Lillian Smith, a longtime resident of Clayton, is best known for her novel Strange Fruit, published in 1944, and her nonfiction treatise Killers of the Dream, first published in 1949 and reissued in 1961. Both works are strong denunciations of racism and segregation in the South.
Walter Griffin, pictured in 2005, founded the Atlanta Poets Workshop in 1972 and conducted meetings until 1998. Griffin had more than 400 publications to his credit and was named the master poet-in-residence by the Georgia Council for the Arts and Humanities in 1978.
Courtesy of Walter Griffin
In 1976 Walter Griffin, an Atlanta poet, published Port Authority: Selected Poems, 1965-1976. Another of his published collections, Night Music (1974), won the International Small Press Book Award and the Georgia Poet of the Year Award.
Georgia poet Rosemary Daniell leads a Zona Rosa workshop at her home in Savannah. Daniell founded this creative-writing forum for women in 1981 and christened it Zona Rosa, which is Spanish for "pink zone," in 1983. Similar workshops also operate in Atlanta, Daniell's hometown, and in Charleston, South Carolina.
Courtesy of Southern Living
The Woman Who Spilled Words All Over Herself (1997) is a writing guidebook for women by Rosemary Daniell. Daniell, the founder of the Zona Rosa workshops in Savannah, Atlanta, and Charleston, South Carolina, presents the writing process as an opportunity for women's healing and empowerment.
John Donald Wade posed for this portrait by Kate F. Edwards in the early 1910s. Wade, a great-great-grandson of John Adam Treutlen, the state's first governor, was an important participant in the Vanderbilt Agrarian movement of the 1930s. Also a noted biographer, Wade published works on the lives of Augustus Baldwin Longstreet and John Wesley.
Native Georgian John Donald Wade contributed to I'll Take My Stand (1930), the manifesto of the Agrarian literary movement, while teaching at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1934 Wade returned to the University of Georgia, where his academic career began, and twelve years later founded the Georgia Review, a renowned literary journal.
From Selected Essays and Other Writings, edited by D. Davidson
Alfred Uhry, a native of Atlanta, is the author of several successful plays, including Driving Miss Daisy (1987), The Last Night of Ballyhoo (1997), and Parade (1998). Uhry has received a Pulitzer Prize, an Academy Award, and several Tony Awards over the course of his career.
Photograph by Carol Rosseg
The spring 2005 issue of the Georgia Review features the work of Savannah artist Nancy Terry Hooten. A photograph of her beaded figure, The One Who Came Before (1998), appears on the cover. A literary journal founded in 1947 at the University of Georgia, the Georgia Review features fiction, poetry, book reviews, and full-color visual art.
Stanley Lindberg served as editor of the Georgia Review from 1977 until his death in 2000. He is credited with transforming this regional literary magazine into an award-winning journal that regularly publishes the work of some of the nation's most renowned writers.
Courtesy of University of Georgia Photographic Services
