Zakes Mda to Appear at AJC Decatur Book Festival

South African author to be featured at local literary event

Zakes Mda, South African author, poet, journalist, playwright, and painter, will be featured as one of the 200 world-class authors to appear at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Decatur Book Festival–– presented by DeKalb Medical.  The festival will be held August 31 to September 2, 2007 in downtown Decatur.

“Zakes Mda is a talented author with a wide range of literary work,” said Daren Wang, Executive Director of the AJC-DBF. “We are pleased to present him as one of our many featured artists.”

Mda splits his time between the United States and South Africa working as a professor of creative writing and literary theory at Ohio University and a professional beekeeper and Founder of the Lower Telle Beekeepers Collective Trust in the Eastern Cape. Zakes is also a director of the Southern African Multimedia AIDS Trust in Sophiatown, Johannesburg.

Mda has won the Notable Books Award of the American Library Association for his book, The Madonna of Excelsior, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the Africa Region, and the Zora Neale Hurston/ Richard Wright Legacy Award for his book, The Heart of Redness.

The festival’s schedule will be released in mid-August on the DBF website.

The 2007 AJC-DBF will be held Labor Day weekend in the downtown Decatur Square. The festival will feature 200 world-class authors, keynote addresses by Charles Frazier, best-selling author of Cold Mountain, and Kinky Friedman, American singer-songwriter, novelist, humorist, and politician, a children’s stage along with children’s activities, live music and poetry, and cooking demonstrations led by celebrity chefs.