Join Southern Lit Cadre member Melissa Stiers for a conversation with Ralph Tejeda Wilson about poetry and the Georgia Writer of The Year competition. Tejeda will also talk about his 2002 poetry collection, A Black Bridge. Sunday at 8pm right after This American Life on your local GPB radio station.

This week, we take a break from Cover to Cover this week to bring you some holiday cheer:

Hanukkah Lights 2008 – Sunday, 12/21, 6 to 7pm
A perennial NPR favorite, now well into its second decade. Acclaimed authors explore Hanukkah traditions in original stories written expressly for “Hanukkah Lights.” Hosted by Murray Horwitz and Susan Stamberg. (pre-empts “Big Band Jump”)

Happy Joyous Hannukah – Sunday, 12/21, 7 to 8pm
Features a concert from New York City-based Grammy-award-winning band, the Klezmatics. Hosted by Murray Horwitz. (pre-empts “This American Life”)

Paul Winter’s Winter Solstice Concert– Sunday, 12/21, 8 to 10pm
The holiday tradition continues with Paul Winter’s Winter Solstice Celebration. The extraordinary acoustics of New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine highlight the music of the Winter Consort with Eugene Friesen, Paul Sullivan and Brazlian percussionist Café leading us through the longest night of the year, with singer/guitarist Renato Braz and “Icarus” double-reed man Paul McCandless. This year’s celebration debuts Apache singer John-Carolos Perea and musical performances from the 2008 Grammy winning CD Crestone. John Schaefer hosts.

Tune in to GPB throughout the month of December for our special holiday programming. Click here for the full holiday programming lineup.

This week on Cover to Cover, Dr. Stan Deaton sits down with Harold Holzer, author of Lincoln: President Elect. Holzer, one of the most eminent Lincoln scholars, winner of a Lincoln Prize for his Lincoln at Cooper Union, examines the four months between Lincoln’s election and Inauguration when the president-elect made the most important decision of his coming presidency—there would be no compromise on slavery or secession of the slaveholding states even at the cost of an inevitable Civil War.

Stan & Harold discuss the book and connections to our current president elect. All this on Cover to Cover; broadcasting on your favorite GPB station.

Frank Reiss interviews Sarah Vowell about her new book about the Puritans, The Wordy Shipmates. Here are Franks thoughts about Sarah and the interview. The show airs Sunday night at 8pm, the following Thursday night at 11:30pm and is available online for on demand listening at gpb.org/covertocover.
While the so-called “Republican base” gets a charge out of the feisty Sarah Palin, for the public radio crowd, there’s an equal and opposite excitement generated by another sassy Sarah, “This American Life” contributor Sarah Vowell. Vowell is a public radio star in part because of the incongruity of her little girl voice talking about very serious subjects with a striking intelligence and obvious depth of knowledge. What can go unnoticed in her most famous role is what a uniquely gifted writer she is. Reading her books leaves no doubt about these gifts. They combine an enthusiasm more often associated with the young rock critic she once was with a profundity that can only come from the kind of focused study that usually results in deadening history books people read only when forced to. And there’s also her post-modern wit that makes her a favorite guest of David Letterman and Jon Stewart. All of which add up to some of the most enjoyable books being written by the distinctive generation of writers that include Dave Eggers, Nick Hornby and the rest of the McSweeney’s/Believer set. Vowell’s latest book, The Wordy Shipmates, is also her most ambitious. Its subject is the Puritans who settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 under the leadership of John Winthrop. Winthrop’s most famous sermon included the image of “The City on the Hill” which was so effectively used by President Ronald Reagan. It is this connection that fuels Vowell’s research, examining this image as the origin of American exceptionalism, and the irony of how this sermon on “Christian Charity” came to inspire quite uncharitable political policies. In conversation, Vowell is just as one would hope: funny, self-deprecating, and tending to let conversation go off into unpredictable, though always entertaining, directions.-Frank Reiss

This week on Cover to Cover, Jesse Freeman sits down with Rome, Georgia writer Raymond Atkins about his book The Front Porch Prophet.

What do a trigger-happy bootlegger with pancreatic cancer, an alcoholic helicopter pilot who is afraid to fly, and a dead guy with his feet in a camp stove have in common? What are the similarities between a fire department that cannot put out fires, a policeman who has a historic cabin fall on him from out of the sky, and an entire family dedicated to a variety of deceased authors? Where can you find a war hero named Termite with a long knife stuck in his liver, a cook named Hoghead who makes the world’s worst coffee, and a supervisor named Pillsbury who nearly gets hung by his employees?
Find out the answers to these questions and how the small town of Sequoyah, GA helped shape the book, this week on Cover to Cover. Airing Sunday at 8PM on YOUR Georgia Public Broadcasting.

Join Stan Deaton on Cover to Cover this week as he interviews African American Historian Annette Gordon-Reed about her new book The Hemingses of Monticello. Annette's latest work tells the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president had been systematically expunged from American history until very recently. It brings to life not only Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson but also their children and Hemings's siblings, who shared a father with Jefferson's wife, Martha. The Hemingses of Monticello sets the family's compelling saga against the backdrop of Revolutionary America, Paris on the eve of its own revolution, 1790s Philadelphia, and plantation life at Monticello.

Cover to Cover airs Sunday at 8:00PM. Tune in on your favorite GPB Station, or log on to listen here.

Cover To Cover and What's The Word will not air Sunday night, November 2 at 8pm so that GPB Radio listeners can hear the live Atlanta Press Club-U.S. Senate Debate between Saxby Chambliss and Jim Martin. Both shows will return next week. Cover To Cover will feature Jesse Freeman's interview with Tony Grooms with a look back at his revelatory collection of short stories, Trouble No More.

Jeff Calder interviews imminent UGA Historian James Cobb about his book Georgia Odyssey this week on Cover to Cover.

The reader will put the book down with a deeper understanding of Georgia in all its contradictions.... "Odyssey" is no dry academic history...[i]nstead, it's an engagingly written volume that sometimes reads more like an irreverent conversation than words on paper.
--Lee Shearer, Athens Banner-Herald

Cover to Cover airs Sunday at 8Pm on Georgia Public Broadcasting.

Sunday at 8pm on GPB Radio, Ronda Rich interviews Celia Rivenbark about her latest book Belle Weather: Mostly Sunny With a Chance of Scattered Hissy Fits. Rivenbark is an award-winning newspaper columnist and freelance journalist whose work has been compared to a cross between Erma Bombeck and Hunter S. Thompson. Celia has won national and state press awards and is the author of four humor collections: Bless Your Heart, Tramp (2000, reprinted in 2006), We're Just Like You, Only Prettier (2004), and Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank (2006). Her latest book is filled with a compendium of provocative essays, including:
--The joys of remodeling Tara--How Harry Potter bitch-slaps Nancy Drew--Britney’s To-Do list: pick okra, cover that thang up--How rugby-playing lesbians torpedoed beach day--Why French women suck at competitive eating--The truth about nature deficit disorder--The difference between cockroaches and water bugs--The beauty of BedazzlersAnd much, much more!
Join Dixie Diva Ronda Rich as she has a Southern Culture hen party with Celia Rivenbark Sunday, October 12 at 8pm on GPB's Cover To Cover.

If you're looking for evidence of bias in the media, you'll have to look further than Bob Schieffer. The longtime host of CBS' "Face the Nation" talked to us while in Atlanta promoting his new book,Bob Schieffer's America and was the very embodiment of the impartial observer virtually all journalists claim to be. As in his book, in our Cover to Cover interview, the veteran newsman in our interview was as folksy as he was informative as we covered a wide range of issues both historical and contemporary, including media bias. Through it all, and in Bob Schieffer's America, the legendary broadcaster was careful to avoid partisanship, expressing his personal thoughts but never in a way to provide fodder for conservatives or liberals. Schieffer shared his insights on the many presidents he has covered (every one since Nixon) and acknowledged that the current financial crisis is the most challenging story he has ever had to report on, owing to its complex nature. In the midst of this crisis--and an historic presidential election (Schieffer will moderate the final debate between John McCain and Barack Obama)--Schieffer's interview provides a tremendous opportunity to hear the thoughts of one of the most clear-headed voices anywhere on some of the most crucial issues that face our nation.
-Frank Reiss


Frank's interview with Bob Schieffer airs this Sunday at 8PM on GPB's Cover to Cover.

This week on Cover to Cover, Frank Reiss interviews David Maraniss about Maraniss's latest book Rome 1960. Here's a quick rundown from their conversation:

At the recently-ended Summer Olympics in China, the haul of gold medals by Michael Phelps, the otherworldly speed of the Jamaican sprinters and the fierce competition between American and Chinese gymnasts filled the airwaves for two solid weeks. As did talk of political propaganda, accusations of rule-breaking and other controversies large and small.

While it seems that the Olympics have forever been dominated in such a way, bestselling author David Maraniss argues in his most recent book, Rome, 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World, that it was at these particular summer games that the Olympics as we now know them first came into being.

That was the year when the world first became familiar with a clownish fighter from Louisville, Kentucky named Cassius Clay, who used the games as a springboard to become the most famous athlete the world has ever known: Muhammad Ali. But Maraniss goes to some lengths to restore Clay's proper place at the time: a definite second or third banana to the true heroes of that year, African-American track stars Wilma Rudolph and Rafer Johnson.

1960 was also the first Olympics for which an American television network purchased broadcast rights, and an unknown reporter named Jim McKay, working under the most primitive conditions imaginable, debuted in the role that made him as familiar as any Olympic performer.

And the Cold War politics of the day foreshadowed the political propaganda that continues to be inescapable in this quadrennial event that supposedly transcends politics.

But to Marannis--who has won the Pulitzer Prize and authored a string of bestsellers about both sports and politics--these political overtones and social developments don't detract from the games, they give them historical context and make for a fascinating read and a stimulating conversation.

Marannis' writing is unmistakably influenced by his friend and long-time mentor, the late David Halberstam. Interestingly, though, Marannis contrasts his attitude toward sportswriting and historical/political writing. Halberstam, Maraniss says in his Cover to Cover interview, wrote about sports to relax between his more "serious" books. Marannis on the other hand thinks sports can be every bit as significant as politics, and politics can be as trivial as sports. -Frank Reiss

Catch Frank Reiss's interview with David Maraniss Sunday night at 8:00PM, rebroadcast Thursday night at 11:30p on GPB Radio. You can also listen to Cover To Cover on demand at gpb.org/covertocover.

Jesse Freeman weighs on in his interview with Tony Earley, which airs Sunday night at 8pm on Cover To Cover--

The Blue Star is a sequel you can enjoy without having read its predecessor. However, if you consider yourself a lover of great contemporary fiction, you’ve probably already read Jim the Boy. Book two in this presumed trilogy places Jim in his senior year of high school in the Western North Carolina town of Aliceville. More to the point, it places our wide-eyed protagonist on the precipice of love, war and tragedy.

Tony Earley joins us to talk about Jim and his other wonderful characters that bring to life the Greatest Generation. He talks about the importance of his influences (Wila Cather!) and his own experience as a child in Appalachia. You’ll find Tony as humble as the avuncular Glass brothers (Jim’s surrogate fathers) and as witty as Dennis Deane (Jim’s loose-lipped running partner). Tony approaches an interview thoughtfully and we think you’ll appreciate the contemplative way he looks back at his works just as you will enjoy the earnestness of the works themselves.

Jack Pendarvis left South Alabama about 15 years ago, settled in Atlanta, where he had a job for Turner Broadcasting, and where he wrote stories and received rejection notices for many years. A few years ago, he started having his often wacky stories accepted by such publications as McSweeney's, The Believer and The Oxford American. In short order, his work attracted the notice of the renowned author Barry Hannah, who was instrumental in Pendarvis' receiving the John Grisham Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, where Pendarvis now resides. Pendarvis is also a recipient of the prestigious Pushcart Prize, which honors the best work published by small presses.
Macadam Cage, a San Francisco literary publisher with a thing for Southern writers, has published two collections of Pendarvis' short fiction: The Mysteriouis Secret of the Valuable Treasure and Your Body is Changing. This summer, they published his first novel, Awesome, a bizarre, and somewhat grotesque, tale about a ridiculously self-absorbed giant named Awesome.
Pendarvis celebrated the novel's publication in his old hometown of Atlanta in mid-August, and the following morning sat down in the GPB studios with Cover to Cover's Frank Reiss. The giddiness from the previous evening had not yet subsided, and what ensued was a weaving, over-the-center-line conversation that threatened to roll off the side of the road and over an embankment at any moment. And, perhaps to the ears of some, did.
Which, appropriately enough, is a perfect introduction to the fiction of Jack Pendarvis.
-Frank ReissFrank's interview with Jack Pendarvis airs Sunday at 8pm, repeats Thursday at 11:30 and can be heard on demand at gpb.org/covertocover.

This Sunday's Cover To Cover will be a "best of" issue. GPB Southern Lit Cadre Member Jeff Calder talks with University of Georgia Professor Ed Pavlic. Pavlic's new book is entitled Winners Have Yet To Be Announced: A Song For Donny Hathaway.

The book is Pavlic's attempt to see inside the life, music and untimely death of this elemental soul music artist, a man remembered for efforts as diverse as "Where Is The Love" with Roberta Flack or the theme to Norman Lear's 1970's sitcom "Maude." But Hathaway was highly influential in his own way, known as "your favorite soul singer's favorite singer." Pavlic tries to inhabit Hathaway, who left little in the way of legitimate biography or history after his jump from the 10th floor window of his room at the Essex House in New York City in 1979.

Writer and musician Jeff Calder and Pavlic talk about Hathaway, and Pavlic's approach to poetry. Listen in and you will also hear portions of Hathaway's songs "Give It Up" and "The Ghetto." We hope you enjoy this week's show. All comments, bouquets and brickbats to ask@gpb.org.