Saturday, July 10th / 5:30-8pm
Whiskey in-person at 5:30pm
Mark Warren via Zoom at 7pm
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*Note* This event is Saturday July 10th
Wyatt Earp: An American Odyssey
by Mark Warren
What Made Wyatt Earp Tick? Many historians have attempted to dissect the personality of Wyatt Earp, calling him a complex man with contradictory callings. He was, in fact, a very simple man with a straight-forward demeanor. His physical prowess put him in a commanding position among other men, but his confidence and deliberation were the palpable forces that made others fear or admire him.
After 63 years of research, author and Western historian Mark Warren reveals the true nature of Wyatt Earp and explains why he has deservedly entered the pantheon of American heroes. His trilogy entitled Wyatt Earp, An American Odyssey is a story of balance, incorporating all the known facts about the famous peace officer’s life and his perspective on the principles by which Earp lived his life—and why he sometimes veered from that credo. Join us for a study of all things Earp!
ADOBE MOON, WYATT EARP, AN AMERICAN ODYSSEY BOOK 1
Adobe Moon, Mark Warren’s first book in a trilogy on Wyatt Earp is more than historical fiction. Though it is a period piece of the 19th century, it is a timeless story that relates to all of us.
Regardless of when or where a person lives in time, each of us is faced with a universal plight: How do we become a man or a woman? And how do we find our place in the world?
Do the times shape us? Yes, just as surely as the place and people around us. Family, especially. It has always been this way.
What if you wanted to run away from home to fight in a war . . . but you were too young? What if you were forced to labor over 80 acres of crops by an overbearing father who knew nothing about giving some slack to his sons? And, as a fourteen year old, after accruing the requisite calluses of farming, what aspirations might you consider for your vocation?
This is the story of such a boy who never quite finds all those answers. But because of his physicality, confidence, and a willingness to exercise deliberate courage, he does find his place in a life much admired by his peers. His name will always be spoken anytime that a conversation arises about justice vs. law and order . . . and how those American commodities do not always balance on the scales of a courtroom bench. His name was Wyatt Earp.
Earp was many things–farmer, freight hauler, stage driver, railroad wrangler, husband, constable, wood splitter, accused horse thief, brothel bouncer, buffalo hunter, gambler, and lawman–most of this in the “new” and raw land of America’s untapped West. The possibilities seemed endless for Wyatt, but he will be remembered in that last category . . . peace officer, a role he did not want. Instead, it would seem that history wanted it for him. He was that good at it.
BORN TO THE BADGE, WYATT EARP AN AMERICAN ODYSSEY BOOK 2
Born to the Badge is the second book in Mark Warren’s trilogy on the life of Wyatt Earp and covers Wyatt’s Kansas years.
In Born to the Badge Wyatt Earp builds his reputation as a Kansas peace officer in the storied towns of Wichita and Dodge City. Known for his straight-ahead, no-nonsense demeanor he is both admired and hated, yet respected by almost all who cross his path. His story broadens with the complications of relationships, one with a common-law wife who struggles to overcome her past as a prostitute … the other with a mercurial but loyal Doc Holliday, the tubercular Georgia dentist who knows that he is condemned to a short life. Still pursuing his dogged fix on becoming something more than a foot-soldier for a town government, Wyatt refines his skills at the gambling tables and bides his time, never realizing that he is moving toward the legend status that awaits him in Arizona.
PROMISED LAND, WYATT EARP, AN AMERICAN ODYSSEY BOOK 3
Promised Land, is the third book of Mark Warren’s trilogy on the life of Wyatt Earp. This long awaited, final installment in the trilogy covers Wyatt’s Tombstone years, the famous gunfight near the OK Corral, and the ensuing “Vendetta Ride.”
From all over the country, dreamers are trekking to Tombstone, Arizona Territory, where a major silver strike promises new opportunities for a man to make his fortune. Wyatt Earp brings to the boomtown a wagon and team of draft horses to open a stage line that will transport people and bullion, but finding the stage business glutted, Wyatt is pulled back into law enforcement.
But Tombstone is not Kansas, where rowdy Texas drovers bring longhorn cattle, mischief, and mayhem . . . all on a seasonal basis. In Arizona desperate saddlers–many of them run out of Texas by the Rangers–make trouble year round, rustling cattle from Mexico and selling it cheap to small-time ranchers, who have reason to turn a blind eye to their crimes.
With three of the Earp brothers wearing badges, the cow-boys face a new threat to their profligate lifestyle. Holding to the letter of the law, the Earps make as many enemies as they do allies in a deeply divided community.
Wyatt aspires to be county sheriff, and to that end he bargains with outlaw informants to help him capture three wanted men. When the deal unravels, the cow-boy traitors fear retribution from their own, planting the seed for the thirty seconds that will ensure Wyatt Earp his place in history–the gunfight that erupts behind the O.K. Corral.
What follows–assassination and swift justice–guarantees that Wyatt Earp’s fame will forever be measured within the debate over law versus order.
About Mark Warren
Mark Warren is a graduate of the University of Georgia with a degree in Chemistry/Pre-med. Mark also pursued music composition and arrangement at Georgia State University, while performing original works in various concerts, scoring plays for The Academy Theater and having his suite The Once and Future King performed by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
At Medicine Bow, his school in the Southern Appalachians, he teaches nature classes and survival skills of the Cherokees. The National Wildlife Federation named him Georgia’s Conservation Educator of the Year in 1980. In 1998 Mark became the U.S. National Champion in whitewater canoeing, and in 1999 he won the World Championship Longbow title
Mark has written extensively for regional and national magazines, including: Guernica, Blue Ridge Highlander, North Georgia Journal, Georgia Backroads, Camping, Paddle, and Survivor’s Edge.
Mark is a lifelong student of Native American and Western Frontier History. He is a member of the Wild West History Association and Western Writers of America. Mark has presented at top western museums around the country, and has been featured on many radio shows and podcasts.
Warren & Whiskey Sponsored By The Oconee Cellar
The Oconee Cellar 6350 Lake Oconee Pkwy STE 108, Greensboro, GA 30642
Georgia Writers Museum invites you to Meet the Author. On the first Tuesday of each month, award-winning authors join us to share their stories, inspiration, and writing process. Guest writers speak about their latest and best-known works, followed by Q&A and lively discussion with the audience.
Books are available for purchase at the event directly from the author and signings are available upon request.
August 3rd, Philip Lee Williams
Georgia Writers Hall of Fame & author of Far Beyond the Gates
Sept. 7th, Bill Curry
2x Super Bowl Champion & author of Ten Men You Meet in the Huddle
Oct. 7th, Kathryn Smith
Baptists & Bootleggers: A Prohibition Expedition through the South … with Cocktail Recipes
Check Out 2020 & 2021 Authors!
June 2021 / Tell Me A Story: My Life with Pat Conroy
Cassandra King was leading a quiet life as a professor, divorced “Sunday wife” of a preacher, and debut novelist when she met Pat Conroy.
Their friendship bloomed into a tentative, long-distance relationship. Pat and Cassandra ultimately married, partly because Pat hated the commute from coastal South Carolina to her native Alabama. It was a union that would last eighteen years, until the beloved literary icon’s death from pancreatic cancer in 2016.
In this poignant, intimate memoir, the woman he called King Ray looks back at her love affair with a natural-born storyteller whose lust for life was fueled by a passion for literature, food, and the Carolina Lowcountry that was his home. As she reflects on their relationship and the eighteen years they spent together, cut short by Pat’s passing at seventy, Cassandra reveals how the marshlands of the South Carolina Lowcountry ultimately cast their spell on her, too, and how she came to understand the convivial, generous, funny, and wounded flesh-and-blood man beneath the legend—her husband, the original Prince of Tides.
Cassandra King Conroy is an award-winning author of five novels, a book of nonfiction, numerous short stories, magazine articles, and essays. She has taught creative writing on the college level, conducted corporate writing seminars, and worked as a human interest reporter.
King’s first novel, Making Waves has been through numerous printings since its release in 1995. Her second novel, the New York Times bestseller The Sunday Wife, was a Booksense choice; a Literary Guild and Book-of-the-Month Club selection; a People Magazine Page-Turner of the Week; Books-a-Million President’s Pick; Utah’s Salt Lake Libraries Readers’ Choice Award nominee; and a South Carolina Readers’ Circle selection. As one of Booksense’s top discussion selections, The Sunday Wife was selected by the Nestle Corporation for a national campaign to promote reading groups.
The Same Sweet Girls was the national number one Booksense Selection on its release in January 2005; a Book-of-the-Month Club and Literary Guild selection; and spent several weeks on both the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists. Both The Sunday Wife and The Same Sweet Girls were nominated for Southern Independent Booksellers Association’s book of the year award. A fourth novel, Queen of Broken Hearts, set in King’s home state of Alabama and released March 2007, became a Literary Guild and Book-of-the-Month Club Selection as well as a SIBA bestseller. The fifth novel, Moonrise, was a SIBA Okra Pick and a Southern Booksellers bestseller, as was her book of non-fiction, released in 2013, The Same Sweet Girls Guide to Life. Most recently, King has been writing for Coastal Living and Southern Living as well as contributing essays to various anthologies. Her new book is a memoir, Tell Me a Story: My Life With Pat Conroy and it was released from William Morrow on October 29, 2019.
The widow of acclaimed author Pat Conroy, Cassandra resides in Beaufort, South Carolina, where she is honorary chair of the Pat Conroy Literary Center.
May 2021 / The Underdogs: Children, Dogs, and the Power of Unconditional Love
There are children so isolated—as a result of illness, disability, or calamity—as to seem unreachable.
But a profoundly solitary child may give friendship a try if the playmate and helper who shows up is a service dog.
The dogs dispatched to families around the globe by the non-profit Ohio-based service dog academy, 4 Paws for Ability, perform miracles of love and empathy.
And yet current scientific research into the emotional and cognitive abilities of dogs suggests these are not “miracles” at all, because intelligence, devotion, and sensitivity are woven into the very nature of dogs.
Melissa Fay Greene is the author of six books of nonfiction: Praying for Sheetrock (1991), The Temple Bombing (1996), Last Man Out (2003), There Is No Me Without You (2006), No Biking in the House Without a Helmet (2011), and The Underdogs (2016). She is the Kirk Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, GA, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Grady College of Journalism of the University of Georgia.
Melissa’s work has been translated into a dozen languages and has been honored with a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Book Award nominations, a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, the ACLU National Civil Liberties Award, the Hadassah Myrtle Wreath Award, the Lillian Smith Book Award, Elle Magazine’s Readers’ Prize, the Salon Book Prize, a Lyndhurst Foundation Fellowship, the Georgia Governor’s Award for the Arts & Humanities, an honorary doctorate from Emory University, and induction into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.
She has contributed to The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Newsweek, LIFE, MS, CNN.com, Huffington Post, and other periodicals. Praying For Sheetrock was named one of the Top 100 Works of American Journalism (Links to an external site.) of the 20th century and appears on Entertainment Weekly‘s list of “The New Classics–The 100 Best Books of the Last 25 Years.”
A native of Macon, Georgia, childhood resident of Dayton, Ohio, and 1975 graduate of Oberlin College, Melissa and her husband, criminal defense attorney Don Samuel, live in Atlanta and have nine children, one son-in-law, two daughters-in-law, one grandson and one granddaughter!
April 2021 / Still Life with Mother and Knife
In Still Life with Mother and Knife, Chelsea Rathburn seeks to voice matters once deemed unspeakable, from collisions between children and predators to the realities of postpartum depression. Still Life with Mother and Knife considers the female body, “mute and posable,” as object of both art and violence. Once an artist’s model, now a mother, Rathburn knows “how hard / it is to be held in the eyes of another.”
Intimate and fearless, her poems move in interlocking sections between the pleasures and dangers of childhood, between masterpieces of art and magazine centerfolds, and―in a gripping sequence in dialogue with Eugene Delacroix’s paintings and sketches of Medea (Delacroix’s Médée Furieuse is pictured at right)—between maternal love and rage. With singular vision and potent poetic form, Rathburn crafts a complex portrait of girlhood and motherhood from which it is impossible to look away.
Chelsea Rathburn is the author of three full-length poetry collections, most recently Still Life with Mother and Knife, a New York Times “New & Noteworthy” book released by Louisiana State University Press in February 2019. Rathburn’s first full-length collection, The Shifting Line, won the 2005 Richard Wilbur Award, and her second collection, A Raft of Grief, was published by Autumn House Press in 2013.
Rathburn’s poems have appeared in the nation’s most esteemed journals, including Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic, The Southern Review, New England Review, and Ploughshares, among others. In a 2019 feature, NPR called Rathburn’s work “arresting” and “a gentle whirlwind.” In 2009, she received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
While she was born in Jacksonville and raised in Miami, Florida, Rathburn has deep roots in the state of Georgia, where her mother’s family has lived since the 1830s. Rathburn moved to Decatur in 2001 after completing graduate school at the University of Arkansas. Since 2013, she has lived in the North Georgia mountains with her husband, the poet James Davis May, and their daughter.
In March 2019, Rathburn was appointed poet laureate of Georgia. For more information on the poet laureateship and literary arts in Georgia, visit the Georgia Council for the Arts.
March 2021 / Suffer & Grow Strong
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20% OFF with promo code: MUPRESS
Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas was an intelligent, spirited woman born in 1834 to one of the wealthiest families in Georgia. At the age of fourteen she began and kept a diary for forty-one years, documenting her life before, during, and after the Civil War. In 1851 she graduated from Wesleyan Female College in Macon, Georgia. Then in 1852 she married her Princeton-educated husband expecting to live a charmed life. However, with the coming of the Civil War and its aftermath, her life changed forever. Thomas experienced loss of wealth, bankruptcy, the death of loved ones, serious illness, and devastating family strife. In 1893, Thomas moved to Atlanta where she became active in many women’s organizations. She found comfort in her work with the Women’s Christian Union and the Suffrage Movement, and began producing articles for newspapers that describe her work after the war. In 1899 Thomas was elected president of the Georgia Woman Suffrage Association. Because of her own losses, she was sensitive to the well-being of other women. Her life is an amazing story of survival and transformation that speaks to women in our own time.
Curry received a B.A. in English from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in History from Georgia State University in Atlanta. She has taught at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky, and the Westminster Schools in Atlanta. Curry has been awarded the Smith-Breckenridge YWCA Distinguished Woman of Achievement Award, the Georgia State University Distinguished Alumni Community Service Award, and the Agnes Scott College Distinguished Alumna Award – Service to the Community. She and her husband, Bill Curry, former football coach, player, and ESPN football analyst, have two children and seven grandchildren.
Feb. 2021 / Eli Hill: A Novel of Reconstruction
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Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin’s 1946 autobiography The Making of a Southerner is a classic account of a white southerner’s commitment to racial justice. Lumpkin’s unpublished novel Eli Hill, which was discovered in her papers after her death, contributes to the same struggle by imaginatively re-creating a historical figure and a moment in the violent white resistance to Reconstruction.
Born to enslaved parents in York County, South Carolina, Elias Hill (1819–1872) learned to read and write and became an influential Baptist minister and political leader. Despite being severely disabled, Hill was one of many victims of a series of vicious attacks by the Ku Klux Klan. After testifying before a congressional committee, Hill led 135 other formerly enslaved people who emigrated to Liberia.
Lumpkin had trained as a sociologist and historian to use archival sources in arguing for socioeconomic change. In her autobiography, she uses the lens of an individual life, her own, to understand how racism was inculcated in white children and how they could free themselves from its grip. With Eli Hill, she turned to imagination, informed by research, to put an African American man at the center of a story about Reconstruction. In curating this important work for use in the classroom, Bruce E. Baker and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall have included the full text of the original manuscript and an introduction that contextualizes both the historical setting and the creation of an antiracist novel by one of the South’s keenest critics.
KATHARINE DU PRE LUMPKIN (1897-1988) was a sociologist and activist who studied, taught, and did research at a number of schools, including Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, Mills College, and Wells College. Although she is best known for The Making of a Southerner, Lumpkin published a number of other books: The Family: A Study of Member Roles; Shutdowns in the Connecticut Valley: A Study of Worker Displacement in the Small Industrial Community; Child Workers in America (with Dorothy W. Douglas); The South in Progress; and The Emancipation of Angelina Grimke. She is an inductee to the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.
BRUCE BAKER is a Reader in American history at Newcastle University and has also taught at Royal Holloway, University of London. Raised in South Carolina, he earned his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and his first book was
What Reconstruction Means: Historical Memory in the American South. He also coedited After Slavery: Race, Labor, and Citizenship in the Reconstruction South and Remembering Reconstruction: Struggles Over the Meaning of America’s Most Turbulent Era. In addition to Reconstruction, Baker has written about lynching, labor history, and the history of New Orleans, including co-authoring The Cotton Kings: Capitalism and Corruption in Turn-of-the-Century New York and New Orleans.
JACQUELYN DOWD HALL is Julia Cherry Spruill Professor Emeritus at UNC-Chapel Hill and founding director of UNC’s Southern Oral History Program. She is past president of the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association and founding president of the Labor and Working Class History Association.
Her books and articles include Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching (1979, 1993); Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (co-authored,1987, 2000); “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History (2005); and Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America (2019).
Most recently, she joined Bruce E. Baker in editing and publishing Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin’s Eli Hill: A Novel of Reconstruction.
In 1999, she was awarded a National Humanities Medal for her efforts to deepen the nation’s engagement with the humanities by “recording history through the lives of ordinary people, and, in so doing, for making history.” She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011. Awards for Sisters and Rebels, her book about Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin and her sisters, include the 2020 PEN America/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography; the Summersell Prize; and the Bell Award from the Georgia Historical Society. She was also co-winner of the Charles S. Sydnor Award from the Southern Historical Association, the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize, and the Willie Lee Rose Prize, both from the Southern Association of Women Historians.
Nov. 2020 / The Other Veterans of World War II
Newly published book The Other Veterans of World War II: Stories from Behind the Front Lines honors our veterans. Check out our 2-part book discussion to learn more about the veterans that Rona interviewed in her work and the research that Sue conducts in partnership with the Veteran’s History Project.
If you would like to share your story or that of a veteran you know, contact:
Rona Simmons
404.606.8911
Sue VerHoef
reference(at)atlantahistorycenter.com
404.814.4040
Bruce Gentry, Flannery O’Connor Review
Evelyn C. White, Alice Walker: A Life
James C. Cobb, Georgia Odyssey
Judson Mitcham, Georgia Poet Laureate
Julie Hedgepeth Williams, Three Not-So-Ordinary Joes
Kathryn Smith, The Gatekeeper
Loran Smith, 50 Great Memories in Georgia Football History
Sandra Deal, Memories of the Mansion: The Story of Georgia’s Governor’s Mansion
Vince Dooley, The Legion’s Fighting Bulldog
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