Speakers are listed alphabetically starting with the keynote speakers and all others following. Typically the sorting format is, [Prefix Firstname Lastname].
David Berner
Mr. Berner is an award-winning journalist, broadcaster, author, and teacher. His first book, Accidental Lessons was awarded the 2011 Royal Dragonfly Grand Prize for Literature. His broadcast reporting and audio documentaries have been aired on the CBS Radio Network, NPR’s Weekend Edition and a number of public radio stations across America. David has been the recipient of awards from the Associated Press, RTNDA (Radio and Television News Directors Association) and the Broadcast Education Association.
Phillip Margolin
Phillip Margolin has been a Peace Corps Volunteer, a school teacher and is the author of 15 New York Times Bestsellers. He spent a quarter century as a criminal defense attorney during which he handled 30 homicide cases, including twelve death penalty cases, and argued at the United States Supreme Court. He is a co-founder of Chess for Success, a non-profit that uses chess to teach elementary school children study skills. View Phillip's web site.
Tony Horwitz
Tony is a native of Washington, D.C., and a graduate of Brown University and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. He worked for many years as a reporter, first in Indiana and then during a decade overseas in Australia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, mostly covering wars and conflicts as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. After returning to the U.S., he won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting and worked as a staff writer for The New Yorker before becoming a full-time author.
Four of his books have been national and New York Times bestsellers: A Voyage Long and Strange, Blue Latitudes, Confederates in the Attic, and Baghdad Without A Map. His other work includes "Mississippi Wood," a documentary on PBS about Southern loggers; "The Devil May Care," a collection of fifty tales about intrepid Americans; and contributions to State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America and The New Gilded Age: The New Yorker Looks at the Culture of Affluence.
Tony has also been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a visiting scholar at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. He lives with his wife, Geraldine Brooks, and their sons, Nathaniel and Bizu, on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts.
Barbara Casey
Barbara Casey is president of her own literary agency, representing adult fiction and nonfiction as well as children's. She is also a manuscript consultant and the author of numerous articles, poems and short stories. Her seven award-winning novels have received national recognition, including the Independent Publishers Book Award. Her novel, The House of Kane, released in 2008, was considered for a Pulitzer nomination, and her latest novel, The Cadence of Gypsies, is being reviewed by the Smithsonian for its list of 2011 Best Books.
Ms. Casey has served as judge for the Pathfinder Literary Awards in Palm Beach and Martin Counties, Florida, and was the Florida Regional Advisor for the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators from 1991 through 2003. Ms. Casey's numerous professional associations include the position of editorial consultant for The Jamaican Writers Circle in affiliation with the University of West Indies and Mico Teachers College in Kingston. She also received special recognition for her editorial work on the English translations of Albanian children's stories.
Bert Roughton, Jr.
Bert is the managing editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, since 2007, has been an award-winning journalist for more than three decades.
As a reporter, Roughton wrote about everything from plane crashes to the 1996 Olympic Games. As European correspondent for Cox Newspapers, Roughton covered the war in Kosovo and won a national Headliner award for covering the plight of African children orphaned by the AIDs epidemic.
As an editor, Roughton led the newspaper's 2005 coverage of the Fulton County Courthouse shooting, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of a national Headliner award for breaking news.
Christine Cozzens
Christine Cozzens has written travel essays for The New York Times travel section since 1983. Her essays have appeared in Cara, the Atlanta Celtic Quarterly, and other publications. She is the coauthor (with M. Lee Sayrs) of A Full and Rich Measure: One Hundred Years of Educating Women at Agnes Scott College 1889-1989 and editor of Southern Discourse: Publication of the Southeastern Writing Center Association. Cozzens is Charles A. Dana Professor of English at Agnes Scott College where she teaches nonfiction and directs the Center for Writing and Speaking.
Chuck Barrett
Chuck Barrett, a graduate of Auburn University, is a veteran pilot and air traffic controller. "The Savannah Project", Barrett's first novel, interweaves his aviation expertise, a long-held passion for writing and a keen sense of suspense. He currently resides in Northeast Florida. www.chuckbarrett.org
Cinque Hicks
A graduate of Harvard University's comparative literature program, Hicks is currently visualart critic, arts writer, and arts columnist for Creative Loafing, Atlanta's preeminent alternative
weekly newspaper. He founded Code Z: Black Visual Culture Now, an online daily newsmagazine in 2006. From 2003 to 2005 he edited and produced the arts resource blog The Electric
Skin, profiled by Art in America as one of 10 blogs most worth daily reading. He currentlyserves on the board of Art Papers magazine, as well as on a number of art prize and curatorial
committees. Hicks is currently creative director of the Atlanta Art Now book series and a co-author of its inaugural volume NOPLACENESS: Art and the Post-Urban Landscape.ééééé
Dan Chapman
Dan Chapman has been a reporter for 25 years and covered just about everything: cops to Capitol Hill, cotton farming to Philippine communists. He started at Congressional Quarterly, moved south to the Winston-Salem Journal, Charlotte Observer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In Atlanta since 2000, Chapman covered the 9/11 aftermath in New York before spending three months in the Middle East and Pakistan. For the last few years he has written about the lousy economy and its impact on real people. He lives in Candler Park with wife Bita, a photographer, and their two young sons.
Denise Tompkins
Denise Tompkins' first urban fantasy novel, Legacy, will be published in 2011. The sequel, Wrath, is scheduled to follow soon thereafter. She writes primarily in the genres of romance and fantasy, and finds one is seldom complete for her without the other. A former Human Resources Director and corporate trainer, Denise is now a full-time author. She is a member of the West Georgia Writers' Group and Core Critiques.
