CANCELED - Philip Lee Williams - Far Beyond the Gates

CANCELED - Philip Lee Williams - Far Beyond the Gates

Monday, Mar 09, 2020 7:15 PM

Location:
Decatur Library Auditorium
215 Sycamore Street, Decatur, GA 30030

Due to health concerns for the author, THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED.

Join the Georgia Center for the Book reading and discussion with prize-winning documentarian, author, and journalist Philip Lee Williams for his new novel, “Far Beyond the Gates.”  

This event is free and open to the public. Doors open at 6:30 pm. A Cappella will have copies of the author's books available for purchase for the book signing.

About the Book

In "Far Beyond the Gates," Lucy McKay, a high school English teacher from Mississippi, is estranged from her divorced parents. Her father, Pratt McKay, is a professor of history at UNC-Chapel Hill, and her mother a professor of art history at Duke. Pratt, who is ill with multiple sclerosis, invites Lucy to spend her summer vacation with him at his second home, which is in an expensive gated community 250 miles west of Chapel Hill in the Great Smoky Mountains. Lucy is desperate for her father’s love, but shortly after she arrives, he reveals a shocking fact about his own years in college: he fathered a child born out of wedlock. Within the gated community, Lucy begins to make friends with some of the older residents. Her life changes when she begins to date a landscape contractor named Sean Crayton, who is working in the neighborhood. As the days pass, Lucy realizes how unstable her life has been and how desperately she needs the anchor of lasting love to understand what has happened to her. Told in a double-journal form by Lucy and her father, "Far Beyond the Gates" is a story of love’s cost and necessity.

About the Author

Philip Lee Williams is the author of 20 books, including 13 novels, four works of non-fiction, and three volumes of poetry. They include “The Flower Seeker: An Epic Poem of William Bartram,” “It is Written: My Life in Letters,” “The Color of All Things: 99 Love Poems,” and more. Williams has also published poetry in more than 40 magazines, including Poetry, Press, the Cumberland Poetry Review, and many others. He has published essays and short stories, and one story, “An Early Snow,” published in 2000, was nominated by The Chattahoochee Review for a Pushcart Prize. He is also a prize-winning documentary film writer, producer, and journalist. He is renowned in Georgia for his journalism as well as for his fiction, as he won the Townsend Prize for Fiction for his first novel, “The Heart of a Distant Forest,” and in 1991 was named Georgia Author of the Year for Fiction. He has since then been named Georgia Author of the Year three more times. He was a member of the Graduate Faculty at UGA and was an assistant dean in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences before retiring in February 2012. In 2015 he was named a Grady Fellow, the highest honor that graduates of the UGA College of Journalism and Mass Communication can receive. His work has been included in several anthologies, and in 2001 he was named to Who’s Who in America for his literary accomplishments. He and his wife, Linda, live in a house in the woods on a stream in north central Georgia.