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Former United States Attorney General Griffin Bell, a partner with Robert L. Steed in the prestigious Atlanta law firm of King & Spalding, once described Steed as "half lawyer, half wit. His law partners insist he's a writer, and his writer friends insist he's a lawyer." In fact, Steed built an enviable career in both fields. A graduate of Mercer Law School, Steed became one of the nation’s leading bond attorneys during an era of rapid economic development. All the while he wrote humorous essays that were published in the Atlanta Constitution and collected into books; his barbs were targeted at the vainglorious in politics, entertainment, and society, always imploring them, "Don't take yourself so damn serious." That attitude also served Steed well as a member of the Mercer University Board of Trustees from 1974 till the present. His insight, humor, and love of Mercer helped him to guide the university, as chairman of the Board, through some tempestuous times. Long-time Mercer President Dr. Kirby Godsey said, "I can honestly say that Mercer never had a more loyal alumnus than Bob Steed." Greatness often sprouts from modest roots, and such was the case with Steed. Shared here for the first time is the story behind the persona--the family, wife, wit, and commitment that coalesced to form an extraordinary scholar, writer, and philanthropist.

In her tenth collection, Catharine Savage Brosman's singular voice is heard again as she develops themes featured in her earlier work and adds new ones, displaying her full range of poetic craftsmanship and style and, as one critic wrote, using "metaphors brilliantly fitted in detail to the moods and workings of the human heart and mind." A prefatory poem, "To Readers," uses the figure of trees to emphasize the truth, beauty, mystery, and autonomy of poetry. Yet it is clear that in Brosman's work the art of verse is closely connected to human experience, the very feel of which comes through in the poems that follow.

Death, and the Day’s Light, the volume of poetry James Dickey was working on when he died, offers the writer’s final views on love and death, fathers and sons, and war and resurrection. This volume constitutes an invaluable addition to the canon of a major American poet and allows for a complete understanding of his oeuvre.

William Wright’s eighth collection of poems is an expansive personal journey that includes poems about subjects as varied as a farm woman forsaken by her husband, yellow jackets, insomnia, a mountain witch, salt marshes, a ditch filled with rainwater, and even a post-apocalyptic portrait of the last person on Earth. Beginning with “Prologue,” a piece that embeds a kaleidoscopic, novel-like vision of a small agricultural town and a few of its inhabitants, these poems capture the exterior world and recontextualize its many forms through a dreamlike logic, harnessing radiant imagery and strong aural texture through lines and words that stir both mind and heart. Here, Wright reveals how the most luminous forms often dwell in even the darkest subjects and images.

A unique blend of memoir, literary appreciation, and travel narrative, Reading Life is a series of interrelated essays tracking the relationship between books and experience, dramatizing and reflecting on how stories lead us into the world, and how we transform that engagement with the world back into personal narrative.

Moving and filled with unexpected ideas and imagery, The Color of All Things is a love letter from one man to one woman, but it offers love from each of us to all of us. Brimming with a touching and generous joy, this is a book of everyday needs that can only be filled with a genuine and lasting love. This is the third volume of poetry from Philip Lee Williams, following on his Elegies for the Water and his national book of the year (Books and Culture magazine) The Flower Seeker: An Epic Poem of William Bartram. Like his other volumes of poetry, The Color of All Things moves slowly through the natural world without sentimentality but with surefooted grace and lovely rhythms. Georgia poet laureate Judson Mitcham says that in Williams’s poetry we hear “the distinctive voice of a poet who knows how to tell the stories that matter, how to hold still and take a good look at the natural world and let himself be filled with praise, a poet who knows how to find the right prayer and how to pray it.”

Good ole boy Dickie Frye vanishes from the Georgia hills and the urbane Fletcher Carlyle bursts onto the New York publishing scene, winning the Nobel Prize for literature. But when a psychotic rampage lands Carlyle in Weatherhaven, eminent psychologist Anton Kohl finds himself talking to Dickie Frye. Kohl’s instincts tell him Frye is not lying—but what he says can’t possibly be true. A fallen priest comes out of Sumerian mythology, the love of Kohl’s life comes out of his past, and a chicken comes out of a posh apartment on Central Park West to meet his fate. Anton Kohl’s carefully constructed world is about to be deconstructed.One part fable and one part Southern yarn, Kiss of the Jewel Bird soars from ancient Mesopotamia to modern-day Manhattan, rewriting history and opening a window onto a wider, more magical world, where the path to destiny is anything but straight.

In the fifty years since her death, Flannery O’Connor studies have been conventionally delimited to two critical parameters: the South and the Church of Rome. This work challenges the conception of O’Connor as inherent to a monolithic South and to orthodox Roman Catholicism by problematizing the “Southern Gothic” trope, positing a non-canonical Southern realism, and repositioning O’Connor as essentially ecumenical in her private theology. The study contextualizes O’Connor’s work within the American scene by detailing the varied political and literary histories of the “North” and “South” as well as opposing the notion of region-specific aesthetics and a native anti-realist mode in the South.

In Watershed Days, the reader embarks on a wide array of adventures shared in seasonal order over a period of two years, 2005-2007, yet spanning in memory back to the author’s youth. 

The twenty-four adventures are woven into a subtle, cohesive whole, providing a textured portrait of a young man, his family, and their evolving intimacy and distance with each other and the natural world, the 18-acre homestead to which they have just moved and started working, as well as the woods and rivers of Virginia’s Jefferson National Forest just down Arcadia Road.

Begin with what seems the end of things—how Conall Weaver lifts a gun to his head. And now dive backward into the labyrinthine worlds of home, where Conall is the center, into the maze of love, where Conall seeks and strives with his soul-mate, and into the maze of imagination, with its population of weapon-wielding heroes and local-color Texans…and then on, into the maze of childhood, where time seems illusion and all the threads and stories start. In Conall Weaver, the mundane world and the wonders of the imagination collide and shoot out sparks. Inspired by the life of pulp writer Robert E. Howard, MAZE OF BLOOD explores the roots of story and the compulsions and conflicts of the heart in a Southern landscape.

Within the tightly knit Cherokee community in the Smoky Mountains, a secret society of Snake Dancers is led by a group of elders, four of whom guard an artifact of incredible power. Guardianship has been passed from father to son for over 300 years. Theses artifacts belonged to Kanegwa’ti, a medicine man who controlled the power of Uktena (an evil spirit) in order to protect the tribe. Even the four guardians cannot reveal what they guard. The tradition of secrecy was set up by Kanegwa’ti to prevent anyone from awakening Uktena and bringing destruction.

WHERE THE SOULS GO is Ann Hite’s third novel set in Black Mountain, North Carolina. Readers who loved GHOST ON BLACK MOUNTAIN, Hite’s first novel, will find many of the characters familiar. This book follows three generations of the Pritchard family, not only telling the story of how Hobbs Pritchard became the villain of Black Mountain, but highlighting women’s struggles in Appalachia, beginning in the Depression Era and ending in the mid-sixties.