PHILIP LEE WILLIAMS TO PUBLISH POETRY AND FICTON IN 2009; TO BE FEATURED IN MAJOR PUBLIC SCHOOL ANTHOLOGY Award-winning writer Philip Lee Williams will publish two books in 2009—volumes that will add to his stature as a poet and novelist. In addition, Williams has been selected as one of several Georgia authors to be featured in an anthology that will be taught in eighth grade literature classes across Georgia beginning this fall. Williams’s first book of poetry, Elegies for the Water, will be published by Mercer University Press next spring. The volume deals with the natural world of the seven wooded acres on which Williams lives with his family on a dirt road in north central Georgia.

“I started out as a poet, publishing when I was still in college, so this is in a sense a culmination of many years’ work,” he said. “This book is quiet, intensely personal, and filled with considerable joy for the place I live.”

In the fall of 2009, Williams will publish his tenth novel, The Campfire Boys, a follow-up to his Shaara-Award winning Civil War novel A Distant Flame. In the new work, Williams explores the little-known world of soldier-entertainers in the American Civil War and how their work was directly tied to such later performers as Bob Hope. In this epic tale, Williams tells the story of the three Blackshear brothers and how they came to be among the most noted campfire performers in the Eastern Theater of the Civil War. Using in-depth research and primary resources, he has captured the flavor of how men in combat relieve the deadly pressure of war with singing, skits, and general mayhem. Mercer will also publish The Campfire Boys.

Williams will also be featured in a new eighth grade reader for Georgia students this fall called Connections to Georgia Literature. Part of a state-mandated unit on Georgia literature, the new volume from Houghton Mifflin is tentatively slated to feature, in addition to Williams, Henry Grady, Carson McCullers, James Dickey, David Bottoms, Alfred Uhry, Alice Walker, Jimmy Carter, Raymond Andrews, Amy Blackmarr, and Janisse Ray.

“Obviously, I’m delighted to be included among such august company,” said Williams, “especially since one of the reasons I am a writer is a poem I first read in a public school textbook about the eighth grade.” Williams carries a copy of that poem, “Auto Wreck” by Karl Shapiro, in his billfold to remind him of where his love of writing began.

Williams is one of Georgia’s most honored authors, having won the Townsend Prize for Fiction and having twice been named Georgia Author of the Year. He was also a winner in 2007 of the Georgia Governor’s Award in the Humanities.

The Michael Shaara Award, which Williams won for his earlier Civil War novel A Distant Flame, is given annually to the best novel about the Civil War published in the United States. Williams received the award in ceremonies in 2005 at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston. The following year, the award was won by E.L. Doctorow for The March.

Williams is also a composer and earlier this year released his Holocaust Symphony in memory of Jewish victims of persecution in World War II. It may be found elsewhere on this web site.

Drop him a note. He always writes back.