Georgia Historical Society

Savannah Book Festival Sunday Brunch

Sunday, February 7th, 2010, 11:30 a.m.

Jepson Center for the Arts, Telfair Square, Savannah

The Festival is also thrilled to welcome back Festival favorite Julia Reed as Sunday Brunch Speaker.  Ms. Reed is the author of Queen of the Turtle Derby and Other Southern Phenomena; Ham Biscuits, Hostess Gowns and Other Southern Specialties: An Entertaining Life (with Recipes), a collection of her essays on food for the New York Times Magazine; and The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story, a memoir.  The fundraising Sunday Brunch and talk by Ms. Reed, a much-anticipated event in Savannah’s social calendar, will be held in the Jepson Center for the Arts at 11:30 am.

Set in and around moss-draped Telfair Square in historic Savannah, Georgia, the Savannah Book Festival, which will take place February 5-7, 2010, is an annual, free and open-to-the-public celebration of the written word and its role in improving the human experience.  Our mission is to promote reading, writing and civil conversation.  For each of the past two years, the Festival has attracted dozens of popular and critically acclaimed authors and thousands of readers from all over America to Savannah’s Telfair Square and the culturally significant buildings that surround it—Telfair Academy, Trinity Church and Jepson Center for the Arts.  Within this beautiful venue, the Festival’s authors and their readers experience the intimacy and hospitality for which Savannah is famous.  As renowned historian Charles Bracelen Flood observed after the 2009 Savannah Book Festival:

As the author of 12 books and a former president of the American PEN Center, I have attended every kind of book-related gathering here and abroad.  In recent years I have appeared at the Texas Book Festival and the LA Times Book Festival, as well as giving talks at the Smithsonian and the National Archives.  The Savannah Book Festival is as good a forum for an author as any to which I’ve been.  My wife and I were treated royally.  My own talk was attended by perhaps 150 people in an attractive hall that had excellent acoustics.  The introduction was informed and gracious, the questions were all knowledgeable, and the atmosphere was stimulating.  The signing of my books after my talk and at one of the general welcoming parties was very well handled.

No one can be blasé about the beauty of Savannah [and] its synthesis of history and architecture. Charles Bracelen Flood

For more information, contact Katherine Oxnard at 912-358-0575 or  katherineoxnard@savannahbookfestival.org, or go to www.savannahbookfestival.org.