Writers & Workshops

2024 Writers & Workshops

Reminder: the GHC Cartersville Book Store will be open to sell books by many of our authors.

Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor: Poetry

Woman in a turquoise sweater leaning against a wall, holding some papers, smiling with white space to the left of herMelisa Cahnmann-Taylor, Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia, is the author of Imperfect Tense (poems), and five scholarly books in education. Winner of NEA Big Read Grants, the Beckman award for Professors Who Inspire, a Hambidge Artist Center Residency, a Distinguished NEA Fellowship, and a Fulbright for nine-month study of adult Spanish language acquisition in Oaxaca Mexico, she's served for over ten years as poetry editor for Anthropology & Humanism, judging the ethnographic poetry competition. Her poems, translations, and essays have appeared in RattleGeorgia Review, Tupelo, American Poetry Review, Plume, Women’s Quarterly Review, Cream City Review, Barrow Street, forthcoming in the Southern Humanities Review, Bitter Southerner, and other literary and scholarly homes. Her new co-edited book, The Creative Ethnographer's Notebook, will be published in Fall 2024. 

Author's Website

Ed Pavlic: Poetry

Man with short cropped gray hair and beard wearing circle spectacles in a blazer at a presentation table with a black background with white text

Author of more than a dozen books and pieces in over sixty magazines, Ed Pavlić is an American writer whose work travels across—often blurring—genres: poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and scholarship. Centered in African American and diasporic life and culture, most of his work explores racial dynamics in the experiences of persons—fictive, actual, historical and contemporary—whose placement and perspectives aren’t neatly classifiable in contemporary vocabularies, theirs or ours. His awards include The American Poetry Review / Honickman First Book Award (2001), The National Poetry Series Open Competition (2012, 2014), The Author of the Year Award from the Georgia Writer’s Association (2009), and the Darwin Turner Memorial Award from African American Review (1997). He is Distinguished Research Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Georgia and lives in Athens, GA with his family.

Author's Website

Sally Kilpatrick: Romance

White woman with brown hair looking up and smiling at the camera with her arms crossed in front of her

Sally Kilpatrick is the USA Today bestselling author of six novels. She has won multiple awards, including the 2018 and 2019 Georgia Author of the Year. Her latest release is a Christmas romcom novella, The Not So Nice List. She lives in Marietta, GA with her one husband, two kids, and two cats.

You can find her on Instagram and Facebook @Superwritermom

Author's Website

Rahad Abir: Fiction

Image of a bearded man in a white dress shirt and dark blazer smiling and standing in front of a brick buildingRahad Abir is the author of the novel Bengal Hound. His work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Witness, The Los Angeles Review, Himal Southasian, Courrier International, The Wire, and elsewhere. He has an MFA in fiction from Boston University. He is the recipient of the Charles Pick Fellowship at the University of East Anglia and the Marguerite McGlinn Prize for Fiction. His work has been translated into French and Hindi. Currently, he is working on a short story collection, which was a finalist for the 2021 Miami Book Fair Emerging Writer Fellowship.

Woman in a colorful dress reclining on a park bench with a blurred natural landscape in the backgroundRegina Bradley: Non-Fiction

Dr. Regina N. Bradley is an award-winning writer and researcher of the Black American South. She is an alumna Nasir Jones HipHop Fellow (Hutchins Center, Harvard University, Spring 2016), Associate Professor of English and African Diaspora Studies at Kennesaw State University, a faculty editor for Southern Cultures journal, and co-host of the critically acclaimed southern hip hop podcast Bottom of the Map with music journalist Christina Lee.

A prominent public voice and leading scholar on contemporary Southern Black life and hip hop culture, Dr. Bradley's work has been featured on a range of media outlets including Netflix’s hip hop docuseries Hip-Hop Evolution, Washington Post, NPR, and Atlanta Journal Constitution. In May 2017, Dr. Bradley delivered a TEDx talk, "The Mountaintop Ain't Flat," about the significance of hip hop in bridging the American Black South to the present and future.

Dr. Bradley is also the author of the critically acclaimed book Chronicling Stankonia: the Rise of the Hip-Hop South. Chronicling Stankonia explores how Atlanta, GA hip hop duo OutKast and hip hop influences the culture of the Black American South in the long shadow of the Civil Rights Movement. Chronicling Stankonia was named one of the “Books All Georgians Should Read” in 2022. She is also the editor of An OutKast Reader, a collection of essays about OutKast, and co-editor of the third edition of That’s the Joint!: the Hip Hop Studies Reader with Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal.

Author's Website

Julian Winters: YA

Picture of a bearded man wearing colorful shirts with a blurred natural landscape backgroundJulian Winters is the author of the IBPA Benjamin Franklin Gold Award–winning Running with Lions, the Georgia Peach Book award nominee Right Where I Left You, and the Junior Library Guild selections How to Be Remy CameronThe Summer of Everything, and As You Walk On By. A self-proclaimed comic book geek, Julian currently lives outside of Atlanta, where he can be found reading or watching the only two sports he can follow—volleyball and soccer.

Julian can be found on Instagram @wintersjulian

Author's Website