Georgia Author of the Year Nonfiction & Poetry Winners

Join the Georgia Writers Association and the Georgia Center for the Book for an evening celebrating the Georgia Author of the Year winners for poetry, memoir, and Creative Nonfiction: Justin Gardiner (Small Altars), Laura Newbern (A Night in the Country), and Mimi Zieman (Tap Dancing on Everest). 

This event is free and open to the public. It takes place in the Decatur Library Auditorium, after the library has closed. Please enter through the Ground Floor of Decatur Library, from the lower level of the parking garage.

Learn more about the Georgia Author of the Year Awards here.

About the Readers & Their Books:

Justin Gardiner is the author of three books—the long-form lyric essay Small Altars, winner of a Faulkner-Wisdom Award and published by Tupelo Press; Beneath the Shadow: Legacy and Longing in the Antarctic, published as part of the Crux Literary Nonfiction Series by the University of Georgia Press; and the poetry collection Naming the Lifeboat from Main Street Rag. His essays and poems have appeared in journals that include The Missouri Review, Blackbird, Quarterly West, and Catamaran. He is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University and serves as the Nonfiction Editor of The Southern Humanities Review.

In Small Altars, Justin Gardiner delves into the world of comic books and superheroes as a means for coming to terms with the many struggles of his brother’s life, as well as his untimely death, offering a lyric and honest portrayal of the tolls of mental illness, the redemptive powers of art and familial love, and the complex workings of grief.

Laura Newbern is the author of Love and the Eye, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Kore Press First Book Award, and the recipient of a Writer’s Award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation. Her poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, The Atlantic, and elsewhere; her second collection of poems, A Night in the Country, was selected by Nobel Laureate Louise Glück as a winner of the Changes Book Prize. Originally from Washington, D.C., she is a longtime resident of middle Georgia, where she teaches in the Creative Writing programs at Georgia College.

Selected by Louise Glück as Winner of the 2023 Changes Book Prize, Laura Newbern’s second collection, A Night in the Country, is a work of burning, restrained urgency that looks at loss, isolation, the passage of time—and what endures despite. Written in a town that was once home to the world’s largest asylum, these poems are studies in the dual nature of that idea: asylum, always both a protection and an exile. The “country”  of these poems is not, or not only, the idyllic backdrop of a pastoral scene; it is also, more ominously, the kind of country defined by a flag, dark borderland, and violent history. In other words: place of separation. Writing about the works of Bellini, Newbern shifts focus away from the paintings’ subjects and into the scenery where landscape is what constitutes the irreducible distance of the subjects from every other thing. “The Madonna of the Meadow cannot also be the Madonna not of the Meadow,”  Glück writes in her foreword. “No one thing can be everything.” A Night in the Country is haunted by figures of loneliness who attend to their isolation with a spirit of religiosity, for them a necessary art. This is a quietly astonishing book about the enduring discrepancy between what we hope for and what is possible.

Mimi Zieman is a physician and the 2025 Georgia Author of the Year for her memoir Tap Dancing on Everest. She has also written a play, The Post-Roe Monologues, and other writing has appeared in Salon, The Sun Magazine, Ms. Magazine, USA Today,  Newsweek, and elsewhere. Her Substack newsletter, Medicine, Mountains & More combines medical news with inspiration from art and nature. Learn more at www.mimiziemanmd.com.

The plan in Tap Dancing on Everest was outrageous: A small team of four climbers would attempt a new route on the East Face of Mt. Everest, considered the most remote and dangerous side of the mountain and only successfully climbed once before. Unlike the first larger team, Mimi Zieman’s team would climb without using supplemental oxygen, porter support, or chance for rescue. She would accompany the climbers as the doctor—and only woman—although she was still in her third year of medical school. Full of self-doubt, Zieman grappled with whether to go but couldn’t resist the call of the mountains. On Everest, when three climbers disappeared during their summit attempt, she reached the knife edge of her limits and dug deeply to fight for the climbers’ lives and to find her voice. Sparkling with suspense and vulnerability, Tap Dancing on Everest is a coming-of-age story about the risks we take to become our truest selves. Zieman weaves her childhood as the daughter of immigrants raised in 1970’s New York City, her father a Holocaust survivor, with adventure and medicine, capturing the curiosity and awe of a young woman as she faces down messages to stay small and safe and ventures into the unknown.