ArtsCriticATL.com

Novelist Joshilyn Jackson and Emory University creative writing professor Joseph Skibell are among the 10 finalists recently announced for the 2012 Townsend Prize for fiction. The award is given every two years to an outstanding novel or short story collection by a Georgia author. From this year’s list, it appears that the state’s literary talent is clustered [...]

Lucky are the individuals whose vocation and avocation are one. Count Jerry Siegel among them. The Atlanta photographer has, for 18 years and counting, merged his passion for shooting people and his pleasure in hanging out with artists into a project that has yielded his new book, “Facing South: Portraits of Southern Artists,” and an exhibit [...]

ArtsCriticATL has appointed Scott Freeman as its deputy editor. The Georgia native (left), 53, brings 14 years of experience as an editor with various periodicals, including Atlanta Magazine, Las Vegas Life, Indianapolis Monthly and Creative Loafing. He began his writing career as a journalist, built a reputation for long-form feature writing and is the author of [...]

Can anyone name the winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature? He is an octogenarian Swedish psychologist and poet with a huge reputation in his country of nine million — the Robert Frost of Sweden, according to the editor of the literary magazine Granta. But I imagine that Tomas Transtromer (below) is little known [...]

“Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513-2008” By Henry Louis Gates Jr. Alfred A. Knopf, 487 pages. In the beautifully illustrated pages of “Life Upon These Shores,” Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard professor and America’s most prominent black intellectual, has produced an encyclopedia of black history packaged as a kind of coffee-table [...]

“Noplaceness: Art in a Post-Urban Landscape” By Jerry Cullum, Catherine Fox and Cinqué Hicks. Possible Futures, 260 pages. For some time, large metropolitan art hubs such as New York, London and Berlin have grappled with the magnitude and diversity of the work within their borders. Art scenes are often broken down into specific parts of a [...]