2018 AJC Decatur Book Festival

  

This year's AJC Decatur Book Festival will take place in downtown Decatur, GA, a lovely town just east of Atlanta, over Labor Day weekend, from Friday August 31st through Sunday, September 2nd. It's the largest independent book festival in the country, which features over 600 local, regional and national authors, with plenty of authors of color and women writers, set in one of my favorite areas of metro Atlanta, which has plenty of great shops and restaurants.

Fortunately there is a metro stop in downtown Decatur, with access to the rest of the city, so there is no need to drive or find parking, which is difficult at any time. This year's featured authors include Madeline Miller, Tayari Jones, Rick Bragg, Robert Olen Butler, James Forman, Jr. (the author of Locking Up Our Own, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction in 2017), Charles Frazier, Melissa Fay Greene, Kenny Leon (the Tony Award winning theatre producer), Armistead Maupin, Bernice McFadden, Nathaniel Rich, Karin Slaughter and Beverly Daniel Tatum.

Best of all the festival is free, save for the keynote address by Kenny Leon, which is already sold out.

Participants:

Darryl (kidzdoc)
David (F15Fester)
Kay (RidgewayGirl)
Lisa (labfs39)
Pattie (sophroniaborgia)

The five of us will be making meet up plans over the next few days, including a proposed dinner at The Iberian Pig, which is one of my favorite restaurants in metro Atlanta, on either Friday or, most likely, Saturday.

If anyone is planning to or is interested in going, please let us know!

Here's a link to MARTA, Atlanta's metro system: https://itsmarta.com. Decatur Station on the Blue and Green Lines is right on the square in downtown Decatur, and all of the book festival events are an easy walk from there. I'll be taking it as well.

I've lived in Atlanta since 1997, so I would be happy to help anyone who is planning to attend the festival and isn't familiar with the city.

Looking forward to seeing anyone who wants to meet up!

As a first-timer to the festival, I'm very excited, but also feeling overwhelmed with all the session choices and locations. It will be an experience! Suggestions welcome. I'm especially excited to hear Madeline Miller. I loved The Song of Achilles and look forward to purchasing her new book, Circe, at the festival.

>3 RidgewayGirl: Same here! I think at least two of my work partners are going as well.

>4 labfs39: I'm usually unable to go to the festival, as I essentially always have to work Labor Day weekend. I'm the backup doctor for my group on Monday and Tuesday, but I'm off Saturday and Sunday. The last time I went there were nowhere near as many author sessions as there are this year, so I won't be of much help! All of the session locations should be within walking distance of the Square, the heart of downtown Decatur and the location of the Decatur MARTA train station.

I made a reservation for six at The Iberian Pig at 6:30 pm on Saturday under my name.

I was planning to see Madeline Miller and buy a copy of Circe, but another session was even more interesting to me. Here's what I plan to see this weekend; I've struck out sessions of interest that conflict with the one that I prefer to go to, so if my preferred event is cancelled for some reason or if I change my mind I may choose an alternate one.

Saturday 9/1
10:00-10:45 The Fears of the Rich, The Needs of the Poor
10:00-10:45 The Legend of the Black Mecca
10:00-10:45 Circe (Madeline Miller)
11:15-12:00 Quackery
12:30-13:15 Lighting the Fears of Freedom
13:45-14:30 Fearless Dialogues
13:45-14:30 One’s Place in the World
13:45-14:30 Ticker
13:45-14:30 An American Odyssey (Romare Bearden)
15:00-15:45 Who Protects the Invisible?
16:15-17:00 Fun with Bourbon
17:30-18:15 Understanding Our Painful Past
18:30-xx:xx Dinner at The Iberian Pig

Sunday 9/2
10:00-11:30 Brunch at Café Alsace
12:00-12:45 My Brother Moochie
13:15-14:00 Basque Country
14:30-15:15 Gulf Breezes
14:30-15:15 Lillian Smith Awards (James Forman, Jr.)
15:45-16:30 An American Marriage (Tayari Jones)
15:45-16:30 Dopesick
17:00-17:45 So You Want to Talk About Race
18:00-xx:xx Dinner at Revival

The AJC Decatur Book Festival kicked off on Friday, although the only author events that day were the Keynote and Kidnote Addresses, which were the only ones that required a paid ticket to attend. The meat of the festival took place on Saturday and Sunday, with 600 local and nationally prominent authors giving talks in 16 different venues.

On Friday Kay (RidgewayGirl) from Club Read, who I hadn't met in person but have been friends with for several years, drove to Atlanta for the festival, and her close friend Pattie (sophroniaborgia) flew into town. There wasn't anything to do in Decatur, so we met at the High Museum of Art, the city's main art museum and arguably the most prominent one in the Deep South, late that afternoon to see the exhibition Outliers of Vanguard American Art, which featured the works by 80 American artists, most of whom were self taught, who were influential in the development of Modernism in this country. I live within walking distance from the museum and am a member of it, so Kay and Patty were able to see it for free. We were also fortunate that a museum volunteer gave us and others an impromptu tour of the exhibition, which lasted about an hour and gave us further insight into the artists and their works. Afterward we had a lovely dinner at Rose & Rye, a nearby restaurant that I pass every day that I take the metro to and from work and had wanted to try since it opened last year, which was the first of four splendid meals we had this weekend.

On Saturday I picked up Kay and Pattie from the Buckhead hotel they were staying in, and drove to a metro station on the Green Line east of Downtown and Midtown, in order to avoid the hundreds of thousands of people who attended Dragon Con, the massive sci fi, fantasy and gaming convention, and the Kickoff Classic college football game between Auburn and the University of Washington. We rode from there to Decatur station, which is stragetically situated in the heart of downtown Decatur, which was where the festival took place. Decatur is a very nice town, which is home to two prominent schools of higher education: Emory University, my residency alma mater and one of the "Southern Ivies", a group of prestigious private colleges in the South that are comparable to Ivy League schools, which includes Duke, Vanderbilt, Rice and Tulane, amongst others; and Agnes Scott College, a small but exceptional women's college that is within walking distance of downtown Decatur. Decatur is a sprawling and sizable city, but the downtown area is compact and livable, with a diverse and well educated population, and it contains numerous superb restaurants, cafés and small shops.

The festival's impressive author lineup reflected the diversity of Decatur and nearby Atlanta, with numerous events that included local and national authors of color in over 20 venues, all within walking distance of each other. All three of us struggled to determine which ones we wanted to go to, as on several occasions over the two days there were multiple authors appearing at the same time that we wanted to see, but couldn't. There were essentially a dozen slots for major author readings that one could go to over the two days; I went to 11 of them, missing one that I was only mildly interested in on Saturday because I was starving and needed to eat lunch, and Kay and Pattie went to all 12! (More on the authors I saw shortly.)

The last author talk ended a little after 6 pm, so the three of us met two other LTers, Lisa (labfs39) and David (F15Fester), who also attended the festival that day, on the Historic Square in Decatur to have dinner at The Iberian Pig, my favorite restaurant in metro Atlanta.

From left to right, Kay, Lisa, David and Pattie:

On Sunday Kay, Pattie and I met for brunch at Café Alsace, a lovely French bistro in downtown Decatur owned and operated by an Alsatian woman, then resumed attending author events at the book festival. There weren't nearly as many people as there were on Saturday, but the overall turnout was still good.

More festival photos:

  

Freelance reporter Sonam Vashi interviews fellow journalist and author Isaac J. Bailey about his book My Brother Moochie: Regaining Dignity in the Face of Crime, Poverty, and Racism in the American South:



Former Birmingham, Alabama and current San Sebastián resident Marti Buckley speaks about and prepares three recipes from her book Basque Country: A Culinary Journey Through a Food Lover's Paradise:



Tamika Newhouse interviews fellow author Ijeoma Oluo, who discussed her book So You Want to Talk About Race:



Dr Janet Dewart Bell signs a copy of her book Lighting the Fires of Freedom: African American Women in the Civil Rights Movement:

After the three of us attended Ijeoma Oluo's talk during the last set of sessions on Sunday we had dinner at Revival, one of renowned chef Kevin Gillespie's restaurants, which was a short walk from the Historic Square in Decatur. The Iberian Pig, run by the equally renowned and beloved Castelluci Group, was my favorite Atlanta area restaurant, but that meal may have been the best one I've had in Atlanta in the 21 years I've lived here. I posted photos of the food we had there, and the three other restaurants where we dined, on my Facebook timeline.

Photos of the happy but full and sleepy festival crew taken after we left Revival:

  

We schlepped by foot back to the nearby Decatur MARTA (metro) station, and said goodbye at Inman Park station, where I parked my SUV.

I loved the Edinburgh International Book Festival, but I enjoyed going to the Decatur Book Festival considerably more. There were more authors I was interested in seeing, as I attended nearly as many events there in two days as I did in Edinburgh in two weeks; there were more authors from the African diaspora; the book topics were very timely, given the current troubled political and racial climate in trump's Amerika; the presence of talented local authors was inspiring; the audiences were diverse, intelligent, friendly and asked great questions; the company of Kay, Pattie, Lisa and David was very welcome; the three nearby restaurants we dined in were all outstanding; and, best of all, all of the events on Saturday and Sunday were free! As I may have mentioned earlier this was the best weekend I've ever spent in Atlanta, and I will make it my business to attend this festival every year that I can.

What Darryl said. The Decatur Book Festival exceeded all of my expectations. Not only were the authors attending ones I was very excited about, but the sessions collected the authors in pairs or trios with interesting subjects to discuss. So Hannah Pittard and Rebecca Makkai discussed how communities deal with tragedy and Bernice McFadden and Jon Pineda discussed writing about adolescent girls. All of the session were interesting and flew by.

My favorites were the session on how to talk about race, with Ijeoma Oluo (whose book I recommend to everyone), Charles Frazier in conversation with Thomas Mullen about his new book, Varina, in which he discussed both how to write historical novels where the characters hold the views of that time without alienating modern readers and Franzier's theory that the wide use of morphine and laudanum in the past was a tool to control women and to keep them quiet and submissive.

It was also a good place to just run into authors as they enjoyed the festival alongside readers. I managed to talk to one of my favorite authors (Thomas Mullen) and also waited in a signing line with Lucy Tan (What We Were Promised).