AQLF Book Club Fall Reading Selection: The Color Purple by Alice Walker

The Atlanta Queer Literary Festival (AQLF) Book Club has chosen The Color Purple by Alice Walker as its reading selection for Fall 2018.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize 

Winner of the National Book Award 

  

Published to unprecedented acclaim, The Color Purple established Alice Walker as a major voice in modern fiction. This is the story of two sisters—one a missionary in Africa and the other a child wife living in the South—who sustain their loyalty to and trust in each other across time, distance, and silence. Beautifully imagined and deeply compassionate, this classic novel of American literature is rich with passion, pain, inspiration, and an indomitable love of life.

Alice Walker is  an internationally celebrated writer, poet, and activist whose books include seven novels, four collections of short stories, four children's books, and volumes of essays and poetry. She won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1983 and the National Book Award.

The AQLF Book Club meets at the Ponce de Leon Branch of the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library, which is located at 980 Ponce De Leon Ave. NE, Atlanta, GA 30306. The discussioon starts at 3:00 p.m. and continues through 4:30 p.m. This event is free and everybody is welcome. You do not need to read the book to attend; however, it will deepen your understanding of the book and allow you to participate more fully in the discussion.

AQLF Book Reading Selection for Summer 2018: Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin

The Atlanta Queer Literary Festival (AQLF) Book Club has chosen Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin as it's reading selection for Summer 2018.

The first novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin’s best-selling San Francisco saga, soon to return to television as a Netflix original series once again starring Laura Linney and Olympia Dukakis.

For almost four decades Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City has blazed its own trail through popular culture—from a groundbreaking newspaper serial to a classic novel, to a television event that entranced millions around the world. The first of nine novels about the denizens of the mythic apartment house at 28 Barbary Lane, Tales is both a sparkling comedy of manners and an indelible portrait of an era that changed forever the way we live.

Armistead Maupin is the author of the nine-volume Tales of the City series, which includes Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, Further Tales of the City, Babycakes, Significant Others, Sure of You, Michael Tolliver Lives, Mary Ann in Autumn, and now The Days of Anna Madrigal. Maupin's other novels include Maybe the Moon and The Night Listener. Maupin was the 2012 recipient of the Lambda Literary Foundation's Pioneer Award. He lives in San Francisco with his husband, the photographer Christopher Turner.

The AQLF Book Club meets at the Ponce de Leon Branch of the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library, which is located at 980 Ponce De Leon Ave. NE, Atlanta, GA 30306. The discuss starts at 3:00 p.m. and continues through 4:00 p.m. This event is free and everybody is welcome. You do not need to read the book to attend; however, it will deepen your understanding of the book and allow you to participate more fully in the discussion.

AQLF bringing poetry to Pasaquan Nov. 2-3

AQLF is proud to present a great lineup of poets reading at this years “Artists for Pasaquan” weekend. St. E.O.M.’s story is a truly inspirational one for the GLBT community. Eddie Martin left middle-Georgia at an early age to live in NYC’s village at the height of the bohemian era. He spent years telling fortunes and visiting the cities art museums.

He had a vision to return to Georgia and create PASAQUAN, the word-famous folk art compound. The site is a multi-cultural blend of influences from around the world. Atlantans may know his artwork from the downtown Olympic folk art park that recreates part of the compound.

Poets will be presenting works reflecting the struggle and triumph of the outsiders and visionaries in our community. Readings will be at 2 and 4 pm on Saturday, November 2nd. Want to read? Some spots still available.

Artists for Pasaquan allows artists and musicians to demonstrate their belief in the importance of preserving Pasaquan while offering visitors one last chance to see this world-renowned art site before it closes for the winter. Pasaquan and its eccentric creator, Eddie Owens Martin, a.k.a. St. EOM, have been featured in dozens of local, regional, and national publications and television shows, including the New York Times, NPR, Smithsonian Magazine and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Cameras and picnic baskets are welcome. Food will also be available for purchase.

The site is located near Buena Vista, Ga., an easy drive from Atlanta, Columbus, Macon and Albany. For directions and further information, visit www.pasaquan.com. Admission to Artists for Pasaquan is $5 per person, free for kids 6 and under. Cash only, please. All proceeds go to the preservation of Pasaquan.

VISIONS OF PASAQUAN, POETRY IN THE SPIRIT OF ST. E.O.M. 

Readings at 2 and 4 pm, November 2 Visit our Facebook page at: Visions of Pasaquan - Poetry Reading - Pasaquan Festival Artists for Pasaquan Weekend, Saturday, Nov. 2 from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. (gates close at 6), Sunday, Nov. 3 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission is $5 (free for kids 6 and under) CASH ONLY Visit www.pasaquan.com for directions

Salon LGBTQ is Oct. 17-19

We're happy to announce that we are a Media Sponsor of Salon LGBTQ, a national social media conference that is launching next month at the Renaissance Midtown on October 17-19. The event will be hosting conversations about blogging, social media platform building, communication strategy, funding creative projects and publishing. Featured speakers include individual authors and creatives, editors from websites including Autostraddle and NewNowNext, and national non-profit leaders from the LGBTQ sector. Salon LGBTQ is extending a 50% discount to welcome you to the conversation, and some volunteer slots may also be available. You can register via their website and use the code "FAMILY" to obtain the discount.

For more information about the event, visit:

www.salonLGBTQ.com
www.twitter.com/salonLGBTQ 
www.facebook.com/SalonLGBTQ

So Many Books, So Little Time

Informal Observations of the 2013 Decatur Book Festival

By Franklin Abbott

AQLF Founder

Today after saying goodbye to my Athens friends, Bill and Roger, who came over to attend the festival with me, I went back to bed.  I was just plain tuckered out.  The festival was up and down a couple of hills and it seemed that the next session I wanted to attend was always on the other side of the incline.  It was much milder temp wise than it could have been but it was humid.  Atlanta has been more humid this year than in its recorded history. 

The festival began for me on Friday night with dinner at The Iberian Pig with my novelist friend Manil Suri.  Manil had eaten at the Pig when he was last in Atlanta and wanted to go back in search of a dish that combined pork belly and octopus.  Both were still on the menu but separately this time.  We had a long, lovely dinner and caught up on our lives for the four years since last we met.  He had come to DBF to promote his new novel "The City of Devi" which is just out in paperback.  It is the third book of a trilogy of novels he has written that explore life in India and the Hindu trinity of Vishnu, Shiva and (not Brahma but) Devi.

The last novel is futuristic and follows the intersecting lives of three people caught in an invisible love triangle. He told me had a power point presentation for the next day's event and to be prepared for special effects.  Over desert at Leon's Full Service he told me about his new novel project which will be about math.  Manil is a math professor in Maryland and the new novel will bring together his literary talent and his love for numbers.

Bill and Roger arrived the next morning and we set off to Decatur to hear Richard Blanco read poetry at the Presbyterian church.  Blanco was the poet at Obama's last inauguration who was notable because he is both Latino and gay.  I was not particularly impressed by his reading at the inauguration but in person he was much more charming (and handsome) and he held his large audience in the palm of his hand.  We would all have gladly stayed for more.  Next was Manil's presentation at the Marriott.  We had both worried about the potential size of his audience but he had a large one and his presentation was lots of fun.  His special effects and graphic presentation brought life to the story and characters of his novel.  We went to lunch with friends at Hola! afterwards where the food and conversation continued the good energy of the morning.

I followed my friend Cal to hear Wayne Koestenbaum discuss his new book "My 1980's and Other Essays" at Eddie's Attic.  Wayne is the lovechild of John Waters and Woody Allen (or maybe PeeWee Herman), smart, funny, cute, peculiar.  His forty-five minutes of fame were a delightful mix of droll humor and piercing insight. 

Back down the hill to the Marriott for my friends' Eve Hoffman and Sal Brownfield's presentation of their book of art and essay, "A Celebration of Healing."  Sal is a painter and Eve, a poet (and they are a couple in life as well as in art).  Sal began a project of painting breast cancer survivors which culminated in twenty-one large canvasses that are more like stained glass windows.  They are luminous and what they illuminate is courage, damage and the will to live on.  Eve's poetic essays give us the stories behind the paintings.  Two of Sal's paintings framed them as they talked and read.  These images and stories were intended to move us to deeper empathy and they did.

I dried my eyes and walked back up the hill and across the courtyard, down the hill and up the hill again to the Decatur High School where my friend Megan Volpert was launching her new anthology "This Assignment Is So Gay," a book of poems by lgbtiq poets on the art of teaching.  State Representative Karla Drenner, Georgia's first out gay legislator, introduced Megan, saying the book had made her cry.  Megan had assembled an interesting panel of her contributors to read their own and other poems.  Sister Theresa Davis was there, her rambunctious self an exclamation point!  Poets new to me, Pablo Miguel Martinez and Jee Leong Koh, added their names to my list of poets to pay attention to.  I bought Koh's "Seven Studies For A Self Portrait" after the signing and look forward to slowly taking it in.

Sunday morning began with a breakfast interview with Alysia Abbott. Alysia's memoir about her dad, Steve Abbott, has been garnering rave reviews since its publication this past Spring. Alysia was born in Atlanta.  Her father Steve and her mother Barbara Binder were graduate students at Emory.  Her dad was coming to terms with being gay when her mother was killed in a car accident.  He moved with the then 2 year old Alysia to San Francisco to pursue a life as a poet.  She describes their life together in her book "Fairyland" which takes us through the glory days of gay San Francisco to the days of doom that came with AIDS which ultimately claimed her dad. I met Alysia at her hotel and asked her what she wanted for breakfast and she said grits.  We walked to Thumbs Up! where I knew grits were to be found and we put our name on the waiting list.  The hostess asked for a name and I said Abbott.  She then said it was okay if it really wasn't our name and we replied simultaneously, "It is."  We are not closely related.  Her Abbotts are from Nebraska and are Catholic.  My Abbotts are from Alabama and are Protestant.  But after an a good Southern breakfast and an hour and a half of talking about how our lives were connected I felt related.  She was anxious about her presentation.  She hadn't been to Atlanta since 2000 and knew there would be people in her audience who knew her dad in some ways better than she.  That might have been a problem had she been less genuine but it wasn't.  The problem that would be had yet to arise.

I left Alysia at her hotel and scampered up the hill to hear my friend Robert Scherer and Jim Elledge talk about "outsider art."  Each had a book and a different slant on the subject.  Robert had been "apprenticed" to the folk artist/eccentric extraordinaire, Howard Finster, when he was a young man and spoke of Finster's influence on his life and art.  His new book is, however, a book of fine art drawings all done in human blood.  Robert told us how he had inadvertently cut himself one day and how his impulse as an artist was to use the blood he bled to draw.  This has led him to create an extraordinary series of drawings documented in his book.  Jim Elledge, who like Robert, teaches at Kennesaw State University, has written a book about the maligned and misperceived folk artist Henry Darger.  Elledge dedicated years of research to uncover the abuse Darger suffered as a child inmate of the state as the source of his imagery. 

Alysia was up next back at the Marriott and I was tasked with her introduction.  She arrived just in the nick of time but there were technical difficulties with her thumb drive and the computer system in the room.  I don't know the name of the young man who was providing tech support but in less than two minutes he pulled a rabbit out of his hat and the show went on as planned.  With the help of photos of her dad, old news clippings, images of postcards he sent her and excerpts from the book, Alysia told the story of her father's love, her role in his life and art and death and though there were no surprises for those of us who read the book or knew the story, her sincerity was palpable and her story resonated with all the love and loss her audience shared with her.  Stories can change us, can break our hearts and in doing so deepen our human being.  Alysia, like her radical parents, is truly an agent of change.

Up the hill to the Old Courthouse for more poetry.  Sadly the room was stuffy, noise from outside was intrusive, the acoustics were bad . . . I felt sorry for the poets who might have connected better in a more intimate space.  I was also on the verge of being overwhelmed with words.  Bill and Roger and I went to Colbeh, the Persian restaurant on the square to revive ourselves.  We were simply unable to hear anything else. 

Good food did the trick and we wandered among the booths in the light rain lying to ourselves about going to asession on bonobos and atheism.  Because it was overcast all the booths were in shadows.  I looked into one and saw Congressman John Lewis who was there signing a graphic novel,  "March, Part One" with his co-authors.  I regretted not going to his keynote on Friday night.  Lewis is one of my heroes.  I whispered to Roger, "John Lewis is signing his book."  The line was short, we each bought a book and had it signed.  We each shook John Lewis' hand and left with tears in our eyes.

We walked down the hill to the Marriott and agreed we were too tired to wait for bonobos and atheism and went back home.  Pals Cal and Dan who had wandered the festival with us joined us for an informal supper and debriefing.   Had we been less tired we might have come up with a working definition of how and why poetry succeeds but we didn't.  I confess, tired as I was, I had a hard time falling asleep.  For every author I heard, there were three more I wanted to hear.  All the same I fell asleep a lucky man having wandered the festival with my friends, toasted the trinity with Manil Suri, eaten grits with Alysia Abbott and shook hands with John Lewis.  And now with a sigh of relief I can post this to friends far and wide who delight, as I do in the riches of the written word.

P.S.  Extra special thanks to Philip Rafshoon, Daren Wang and all the DBF staff and volunteers for an extraordinary weekend.

www.decaturbookfestival.com

www.manilsuri.com

www.alysiaabbott.com

www.jeeleong.blogspot.com

www.siblingrivalrypress.com

www.topshelfcomix.com

LGBT Track at 2013 Decatur Book Festival

The 2013 Atlanta Journal-Constitution Decatur Book Festival Presented by DeKalb Medical (AJC DBF) will feature its largest and most diverse LGBT track lineup in the festival’s history. The 2013 LGBT track, sponsored by the Atlanta Queer Literary Festival, includes award-wining poets, book launches, seven panels, and more than 25 featured presenters.

AJC DBF Program Director and former Outwrite Bookstore owner, Philip Rafshoon, says, “Much like the entire book festival, the lineup of this year’s LGBT track reflects the diversity of our community and the strength of our voices. We are very fortunate to have a great selection of authors who can speak openly about their lives and the lives of others.”

The Atlanta Queer Literary Festival worked with the Decatur Book Festival to help set up the LGBT track for the 2013 Festival.

Poetry

• Richard Blanco, inaugural poet at President Barack Obama’s second inauguration. Presenting “One Today” and other poems, as well as participating in “Poetry and Public Life” discussion
• Carl Phillips, award-winning American poet. Presenting his new work “Silverchest"
• Collin Kelley and Theresa Davis presenting their new poetry collections, "Render" and "After This We Go Dark," published by Sibling Rivalry Press.

Book Launches

• Manil Suri, Indian-American mathematician and award-winning author. Launching the paperback edition of the much praised “The City of Devi”
• Megan Volpert, author, editor, and local English teacher. Launching her poetry anthology “This Assignment is So Gay” teaturing readings from five of the book’s poets as well as a panel discussion led by the Georgia Safe Schools Coalition

Panels

• “Outsider Artists” Featuring authors Jim Elledge and Robert Sherer discussing artists who are dejected, rejected, or both with moderator Diana McClintock
• “Love is Love” featuring David Levithan and Sara Farazin sharing their new books on gay teen relationships: “Two Boys Kissing” and “If You Could Be Mine”
•  “American Homophobia” featuring David McConnell discussing his nonfiction piece “American Honor Killings,” and Stacy Braukman sharing her historical work “Communists and Perverts Under the Palms: The Johns Committee in Florida, 1956-1965”

Featured Presenters

• Alysia Abbott featuring a presentation of her work “Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father”
• Linda Hirshman featuring a presentation of her work “Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution”
• Wayne Koestenbaum,  cultural critic and American poet, presenting his new essay collection “My 1980s & Other Essays”

The full LGBT track schedule, as well as the entire AJC DBF schedule, can be found at:www.DecaturBookFestival.com/2013/schedule/.

AQLF National Poetry Month Reading

AQLF will host a day of poetry readings on Saturday, April 20, to mark National Poetry Month at the Decatur Library in association with Georgia Center for the Book. The readings are free and open to the public. The library is located at 215 Sycamore Street in Downtown. Ample free parking in the deck and less than a block from the Decatur MARTA station.

The reading schedule:

10 to 11 a.m.: Franklin Abbott, Glenda Corwin, Stephen Zeitz, Alice Teeter, Debra Hiers.

11 a.m. to noon: Patrick Morgan, Harold Lefall, Cleo Creech, Collin Kelley, Dustin Brookshire, Lisa Nanette Allender. 

Noon to 1:10 p.m.: Lunch break

1:10 p.m.: Group photo

1:20 to 2 p.m.: Mose Hardin, Sondra Briggs, Young Hughley, Antron-Reshaud Olukayode.

2 to 3 p.m.: M. Charlene Ball, Libby Ware, Sharon J. Sanders, Megan Volpert, Karen G, Gabe Moses.

3 to 4 p.m.: Iyana, Lynne Huffler, Rico Revels, Antoine Norwood, Don Perryman, Roger Bailey.

4 to 5 p.m.: Elliott Mackle, mariana mcdonald, Jef Blocker, Michael Tod Edgerton