Meet the Authors!

 

Roy Richard Grinker

Author of “Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism,” anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker is the keynote speaker of this year’s inaugural Book Fair on the Square. Weaving in stories of his own daughter’s diagnosis and subsequent life with autism, Grinker uses his anthropological background to write about cases found in different cultures around the world – introducing the startling statistic that 1 in 166 people are diagnosed with autism.

Grinker, who comes from a long line of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts (including his grandfather who was analyzed by Sigmund Freud), graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from Grinnell College, as well as his Master of Arts and Ph.D. in Anthropology from Harvard University. He is currently a professor with The Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University.

For more information and to purchase “Unstrange Minds,” visit www.unstrange.com.

Purchase "UnstrangeMinds" from Barnes & Noble.

Rachel Simon

Rachel Simon is the author of the widely acclaimed “Riding the Bus With My Sister,” which also became a popular Hallmark Hall of Fame movie in 2005 starring Rosie O’Donnell and Andie MacDowell. In this memoir, Simon describes her relationship with her sister, Beth, who has developmental disabilities, and chronicles a fateful promise that changed both of their lives and opinions about each other forever.

Simon is also the author of “Little Nightmares, Little Dreams,” “The Magic Touch,” and the upcoming “Building a Home With My Husband.”

For more information about the author and to purchase any of Simon’s books including “Riding the Bus With My Sister,” visit www.rachelsimon.com.

Purchase “Riding the Bus With My Sister” from Barnes & Noble.

Doug Crandell

Georgia author and Douglasville resident Doug Crandell has published several books including “The Flawless Skin of Ugly People,” “The All-American Industrial Motel” and “Pig Boy’s Wicked Bird.” He's also the author of the newly released “Hairdos of the Mildly Depressed.” An acclaimed writer, Crandell is the most recently named Author of the Year (memoir category) by the Georgia Writers Association.

Crandell's books have often featured characters with some form of a disability. In “Pig Boy’s Wicked Bird,” the main character is missing some of his fingers. In the new “Hairdos of the Mildly Depressed,” one of the characters has a traumatic brain injury.

For more information and to purchase any of Crandell's books, visit www.dougcrandell.com

Purchase books by Doug Crandell from Barnes & Noble.

Laura Flynn

“Swallow the Ocean” is author Laura Flynn's first book, and has received several positive reviews. The memoir follows Flynn's childhood, growing up with a mother who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

Flynn received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, and went on to graduate with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota. She currently teaches editing classes at the University of Minnesota, and lives in Minneapolis with her husband, the poet Mike Rollin.

For more information and to purchase “Swallow the Ocean,” visit www.lauramflynn.com.

Purchase “Swallow the Ocean” from Barnes & Noble.

Katharine Noel

Katharine Noel’s award winning “Halfway House” is about the Voorster family's reaction to their Ivy League-bound daughter’s sudden battle with bipolar disorder. The book was recognized as a 2006 New York Times Editors’ Choice. Noel earned the Ken/NAMI award and Kate Chopin award, along with being recognized by the Coalition of Behavioral Health Agencies.

Noel, currently a professor at Stanford University, had previously worked at Gould Farm, a program for adults with mental illnesses. She lives in San Francisco with fellow writer Eric Puchner and their daughter.

For more information, and to purchase “Halfway House,” visit www.katharinenoel.com.

Purchase “Halfway House” from Barnes & Noble.

Sande Cropsey

Sandra Jones Cropsey writes plays, screenplays, children's stories and recently published her first novel, Who's There, which was a finalist in the “Georgia Author of the Year Awards” and ForeWord Magazine’s “Book of the Year Awards.”An audio version of the novel complete with music is in the works. Her first children's book, Tinker’s Christmas, was published in 2002 and sold 600 copies in four weeks. This same book will air as a radio drama this Christmas on WHIE and WKEU in Griffin and is under consideration for production as a play. Original music by composer Danny Smith is being written for Tinker’s Christmas.

Purchase “Who's There” from Barnes & Noble.

David Gelin

David Gelin was born in New York and raised outside of D.C., but fate, college and mild winters brought him to Dixie. Along with the aptly named Buddy, an animal rescue slated for the big dog house in the sky, they are most at home on the open road.
About BBQ Joints, Stories and Secret Recipes from the Barbeque Belt, the Reverend Billy Wertz, the First House of Polyester Worship, wrote, “This book puts a Sleeper Hold on those who sell pale imitations of the real deal; and delivers the heart punch to those other Pencil Necked ‘experts’ who wouldn't know good ‘Q if it came up and bit them on their smoked pork butt.”

Purchase BBQ Joints from Barnes and Noble

Jackie Cooper

Jackie Cooper, the beloved author of Journey of A Gentle Southern Man, Chances and Choices, Halfway Home, and The Bookbinder is back with a new collection of stories in The Sunrise Remembers. Every morning when the sun rises, it brings back memories of your life and lends them to you for another day. At least this is what Cooper believes and uses as the inspiration for this book of stories. Join Cooper as he remembers a life well lived and a present that is inspiring. Cooper received a Doctor of Jurisprudence (JD) from the University of South Carolina. He is the “Entertainment Critic” for 41 NBC in Macon.

Purchase The Sunrise Remembers from Barnes and Noble

William Rawlings

William Rawlings was born and raised in Sandersville, Georgia, where he still lives on the family farm with his wife and two children. Though he is author of four successful novels, writing is a relatively new interest. His most recent novel, Crossword, was described by one reviewer as “an absolute page-turner that just also happens to be a lovely piece of Southern literature.”
Educated at Emory, Tulane and Johns Hopkins Universities, Rawlings says that he likes to write “intelligent thrillers” that reflect the reality of life in the non-urban South. His previous books have won literary awards and a movie option. He recently completed his fifth novel (tentatively titled The Mile High Club), a complex tale involving the bizarre death of a beautiful young woman, the timber industry, skydiving and alternative fuels.

Purchase Crossword from Barnes and Noble

Man Martin

Man Martin spent his formative childhood years in Sandersville, Georgia, a town so small that the phonebook for the entire county – white and yellow pages included – was the size and thickness of a large comic book. His experiences there helped shape his debut novel, Days of the Endless Corvette, which won him Georgia Author of the Year for First Novel.
Days of the Endless Corvette is a tall-tale and love story set in mythical Humble County, Georgia which has been described by M Joshilyn Jackson as “wonderful in every sense of the word.”

For more information visit manmartin.net

Purchase "Days of the Endless Corvette" from Barnes & Noble.

John Holman

John Holman is the author of a short story collection, Squabble and Other Stories, and a novel, Luminous Mysteries. His stories also have appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, Mississippi Review, Crescent Review, Apalachee Quarterly, Carolina Quarterly, Oxford American and Alabama Literary Review.
Of his novel, Luminous Mysteries, Washington Post Book World writes, “John Holman reveals a certain eye for ironies and surreal details that skew normal life into something wonderful, strange and surprising.”

Purchase Luminous Mysteries from Barnes and Noble

Josh Russell

Yellow Jack is a ribald, picaresque trip through an 1840s New Orleans saturated with sex, drugs, death, and corruption, which Entertainment Weekly calls “luminously haunting.” In this portrait of decadence, daguerrotypist Claude Marchand becomes hopelessly entangled with both a voodoo-adept octoroon mistress and the erotically precocious daughter of a prominent New Orleans family.
Josh Russell is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature and teaches creative writing at Georgia State University.

Purchase Yellow Jack from Barnes and Noble

Sheri Joseph

Sheri Joseph’s novel Stray, an intense story of an unconventional love triangle, won the Grub Street National Book Prize. Her cycle of stories, Bear Me Safely Over (Grove/Atlantic Press, 2002), was a Book Sense 76 selection in both hardcover and paperback.
Her short fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals including The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, and Virginia Quarterly Review, and she has received summer fellowships to Yaddo, MacDowell, and other artist retreats. She teaches in the creative writing program at Georgia State University, where she also serves as fiction editor of Five Points literary magazine.

Visit at www.sherijoseph.com

Purchase Stray from Barnes and Noble

Chris Bundy

Christopher Bundy is an editor, teacher and writer in Atlanta. His short stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Glimmer Train Stories, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, The Rambler, Creative Loafing, The Dos Passos Review, Main Street Rag, and many others. His work also appears or is forthcoming in the anthologies Where Love is Found: 24 Tales of Connection (2006), from Simon & Schuster, Stars Fell (Fall 2008), from Hub City, and others.

Purchase Where Love is Found, containing Bundy’s short story, “Morning Prayers” from Barnes and Noble

Thomas Lux

Called “one of this generation’s most gifted poets” by Washington Post Book World, Thomas Lux holds the Bourne Chair in Poetry and is the director of the McEver Visiting Writers Program at Georgia Institute of Technology. He has been awarded three NEA grants and the Kingsley Tufts Award and is a former Guggenheim Fellow.
His latest collection God Particles is a mixture of grim humor, honesty, eerily vivid imagery, and a surprising tenderness that is never sentimental, and his collection New and Selected Poems was called heady mix of linguistic ease, pathos, and gentle humor, and which was named by New York Public Library as one of its “25 Books to Remember.”

Purchase God Particles from Barnes and Noble

Beth Gylys

Beth Gylys is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Georgia State. She has published two award-winning collections of poems: Bodies that Hum won the Gerald Cable First Book Award and was published by Silverfish Review Press in 1999; Spot in the Dark won the Journal Award and was published by Ohio State University Press in 2004. Her chapbook Balloon Heart won the Quentin R. Howard Award and was released by Wind Publications in 1997. Her poems have appeared in the Paris Review, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, Antioch Review, Columbia Review and other journals, and she has had work in several anthologies: American Poetry: The Next Generation. Eds. Gerald Costanza and Jim Daniels, the 1996 Anthology of Best Magazine Verse, and Under the Rock Umbrella: Contemporary American Poets from 1951-1977.

Purchase Spot in the Dark from Barnes and Noble

Rebecca Burns

In September 1906, triggered by newspaper accounts accusing black men of sexually assaulting white women, Atlanta's simmering racial tension exploded.
Burns, the editor-in-chief of Atlanta Magazine and a journalist in Atlanta for the past 15 years (apart from a brief stint with Indianapolis Monthly), provides a compelling narrative of the events during the month that shaped Atlanta and explores questions of race and class prejudice that are as relevant today as they were a century ago.

Purchase Rage in the Gate City from Barnes and Noble

Tony Grooms

Anthony Grooms and grew up in rural Virginia, where in 1967 he experienced the integration of public schools, an event that has contributed to a perspective on race and class that is evident in many of his writings. His education at the College of William and Mary and George Mason University led him to a teaching career in Georgia, where since 1995, he has taught writing at Kennesaw State University. He is the author of Ice Poems, a chapbook of poems, Trouble No More: Stories and Bombingham, a novel and finalist for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award.
Reviewing Bombingham for The Washington Post, critic Jabari Asim wrote, "In its insistence that 'the world is a tumultuous place and every soul in it suffers,' this powerful, resonant novel offers no consolations. Grooms offers consolation, however, in allowing us to be present at the emergence of a brave and promising talent, fully equipped to take on the writer's task of confronting chaos and wrestling it into form."

Purchase Bombingham from Barnes and Noble

Charles Banov, M.D.

Dr. Charles Banov, an internationally prominent physician recalls the beginnings and progress of his 50-year career- from naive medical student and Navy physician to small-town doctor. He looks back with honesty and humor at growing up a Jew in the racist South and opening the first doctor’s office in a tiny Texas town.

His absorbing collection of stories from nearly a half-century of treating patients, rising to the top of international professional associations, and traveling the world, Dr. Banov remembers professors who instilled a love of medicine and patients and who taught him to respect human dignity. He also reveals his struggles – as a father of a special needs child and as a volunteer during several natural disasters.

The drama, humor and humanity of Dr. Banov’s many years as a practicing physician will enrich and inspire medical students, health care professionals and people everywhere who want to make a difference in their communities.

Purchase Office Upstairs: A Doctor's Journery from Barnes
and Noble