In my City Talk column on Tuesday in the Savannah Morning News, I noted the big crowds for Saturday’s Savannah Book Festival and also mentioned the beautiful backdrops for many of the presentations.
I already posted some thoughts and a lot of pics of Al Gore’s rather remarkable appearance at Trinity United Methodist Church.
I was especially taken by the visuals of two author talks I attended in the downstairs sculpture gallery at the Telfair Academy. I’ll add that the authors down there maybe needed a bit more light on them — most of the light was concentrated as it usually is on the art.
So here are a couple of not-as-clear-as-they-should-be shots of Susanna Sonnenberg, author of She Matters: A Life in Friendships, and J.R. Moehringer, author of the new novel Sutton, about the life of legendary bank robber Willie Sutton.
I love the juxtaposition of the authors with the dying Gaul sculpture and the various paintings behind them, especially the beautiful Gari Melchers work acquired just last year.
And the crowd shot is of Edith Stanley, the news researcher who assisted Moehringer on his Pulitzer Prize winning series in the L.A. Times about Gee’s Bend. I caught the crowd’s reaction at the moment when Stanley mentioned that the L.A. Times editors, in giving her some background on the writer, alerted her that Moehringer was a “hunk”. A nice moment, and pretty clear evidence of the fun and levity of many of the presentations.
And there’s a shot here of Griff and Cheryl Day, who had a crowd of about 100 to listen to them talk about their bakery Back in the Day and their recent Back in the Day Bakery Cookbook.
