Morning is a part of everyone's life. But relatively little has been written directly about morning itself because it is a background rather than a major theme. In this book of creative nature non-fiction, author Philip Lee Williams takes us on a journey that is scientific, artistic, and very personal. A self-proclaimed "morning person," Williams looks at morning from a number of angles, including those of science, art, religion, and sociology. But mostly he shows us, in deeply personal essays, how morning has operated in his own life.

Writing in the kind of charged and poetic language for which he is well known, Williams takes us on a journey through time with morning. We hear of how musicians and visual artists envisioned morning, and how our concept of morning shifted radically after the invention of electric lights. But much more, Williams takes us with him on an odyssey of his own life's mornings. Go with him and his brother on a morning canoe trip on a wild stretch of a Georgia river. Walk with him from dawn to noon on the 7 wild acres where they live in the southern part of Georgia's Oconee County. But mostly, the book is a reconsideration of something we all take too much for granted.

Hardcover: 144 pages
Publisher: Mercer University Press

 

Philip Lee Williams’s latest book is the massive novel The Divine Comics: A Vaudeville Show in Three Acts, published in late 2011. His new novel, Emerson’s Brother, will be published in late spring 2012.

In 2011, the University of Georgia Press published a new edition of Williams's award-winning Civil War novel, A Distant Flame. This novel originally published by St. Martin's in 2004, was winner of the Michael Shaara Prize, given to the best single Civil War novel published in the United States the previous year.

Williams’s much-praised book-length poem, The Flower Seeker: An Epic Poem of William Bartram, came out in the fall of 2010. It was named Book of the Year by the national literary journal Books and Culture and won Williams his fourth Georgia Author of the Year Award.

All of Williams’s books are for sale at numerous online outlets and at many bookstores around the world. In addition, his works are in hundreds of libraries around the globe.

Symphony No. 17: Tenebrae

This symphony is subtitled "Tenebrae," which is a religious service in the Christian church but literally means "shadows" or "darkness" in Latin. It is a quiet, contemplative symphony, a single movement for full orchestra. (29'48")

Symphony No. 18: For the Civil Rights Martyrs

This work is subtitled "For the Civil Rights Martyrs" and is in memory of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, murdered in Mississippi in the summer of 1964 while working for Civil Rights. It is also in memory of all who died in the struggle. It is in two movements, "The Lynching" and "Souls."

One: The Lynching (15'25")

Two: Souls (14'25")