2010 was a good year for Joshilyn Jackson. She was a finalist for the Townsend Award for Fiction, and her wonderful novel The Girl Who Stopped Swimming was announced as one of the Center for the Book’s 2010 “25 Books All Georgians Should Read.” Her new novel, Backseat Saints, is a can’t-put-it-down story about love, survival and shedding the past that features a memorable new voice: the tough, passionate and funny Rose Mae Lolly. She’s arguably the best character Jackson’s has ever come up with and is perfect for a book that is both high spirited and darker than her previous novels Gods in Alabama and Between Georgia. Joshilyn Jackson joined us for an author talk on June 29, 2010 at the Tucker-Reid H. Cofer Library.

Jane Mendelssohn author of The New York Times’ best-selling novel I Was Amelia Earhart, visits us with a memorable, original new book, American Music. It’s a luminous love story centering on Milo, a severely wounded Iraq war veteran, and Honor, a former dancer who is now his physical therapist. Whenever she touches his damaged back, mysterious images from the past appear to both Milo and Honor, ultimately revealing the source of their growing love. Critics say it’s a “beautiful mystery and a meditation on love, its power and its limitations.“ It is a book of almost hypnotic power by one of America’s finest novelists, and we know you’ll find it an unforgettable evening.

Dr. Keith Gilyard is one of America’s most highly regarded scholars of African American writers.  In this author talk, he discussed his new book, the first major biography of an important native Georgia author, John Oliver Killens: A Life of Black Literary Activism. Killens was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, was the founding chairman of the legendary Harlem Writers Guild and is regarded as the father of the Black Arts Movement. Gilyard’s biography examines his life and those whose lives he touched including W.E.B. DuBois, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Maya Angelou and Langston Hughes. We are very happy to share this illuminating talk with you in this program.

The publication of Jean Kwok’s debut novel, Girl in Translation, is a literary event with a remarkable story about it. It is an affecting story of a girl who goes from a sweatshop to the Ivy League. Mirroring this novel’s tale is the real story of the author, who was born in Hong Kong, emigrated to Brooklyn with her family, worked in a Chinatown factory and managed to put herself through Harvard. She has been a teacher and translator in the Netherlands, a reader for the blind, a housekeeper, a ballroom dancer and a computer graphics specialist. Jean Kwok read at the Decatur Library on May 4, 2010.

Maryn McKenna is the prize-winning former science writer for theAJC who won awards for her coverage of the CDC.  She returns to the Library with a frightening but true new book, Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA. MRSA is a terrifying pathogen that is evolving faster than the medical community can develop antibiotics to stop it, and it is now beginning to threaten not just hospitals and clinics but individuals young and old, healthy and sick. McKenna is also a former Fellow at the University of Michigan and Harvard Medical School and the author of Beating Back the Devil: On the Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service.  She joined us on April 27th, 2010.