Authors from all across the world will call downtown Decatur home for a weekend, as the 2008 Atlanta Journal-Constitution Decatur Book Festival Presented by DeKalb Medical (DBF) welcomes a mélange of international authors.
DBF will be held Labor Day Weekend, August 29-31, on and around the downtown Decatur Square.
“Everyone has a story to tell, whether they live in New York City or in the Columbian jungles,” said Tom Bell, Program Director of DBF. “By incorporating local and international authors we hope to share the beauty within the many cultures of the world.”
Among the globetrotting authors will be Megumi Cummings, Christina Thompson, Suzanne Kamata, Raul Benoit, and Lawrence Hill.
Christina Thompson was born in Switzerland, raised in the United States, and then moved to Australia for a period of time where she worked as a freelance journalist and editor at Meanjin magazine. While on her way back to Australia after a stop in the States, she took a brief holiday in New Zealand, where she met her eventual husband, a Maori man (a native tribe). Thompson now lives in the United States with her husband. At the festival, Thompson will be speaking about her book “Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All,” which tells of her experience trying to live in the Maori culture, and of her Maori husband’s adjustments to living in the United States.
She will present Saturday at 3:00 p.m. on the Presbyterian Chapel stage with Suzanne Kamata, a South Carolina native who now lives in Japan with her Japanese husband, and special-needs child. Kamata will present her book “Losing Kei.”
Kamata will also speak Sunday at 1:15 p.m. on the Conference Center Auditorium stage about “Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child of Special Needs,” which she edited. She will speak with Mary Jane Clark, who has a son with Fragile X syndrome.
Saturday, 11:15 a.m., at the Conference Center Auditorium stage, Lawrence Hill, best-selling Canadian novelist will speak about his novel “Somebody Knows My Name,” which is published in Canada as “The Book of Negroes.”
Megumi and Steve Cummings, the comic book artists who inked the “Pantheon High” series from Tokyo Pop will speak Sunday at 5 p.m. at the Library stage.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Decatur Book Festival Presented by DeKalb Medical is the largest independent book festival in the country and one of the 10 largest overall. Each year, more than 250 authors and 50,000 festival goers crowd the historic downtown Decatur Square to enjoy book signings, author readings, panel discussions, an interactive children’s area, live music, parades, cooking demonstrations, poetry slams, writing workshops, and more.
Interviews available upon request.
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