Rescheduled: Stephen Hundley in-conversation with David Kirby with The Aliens Will Come to Georgia First

— THIS EVENT HAS BEEN RESCHEDULED —

About the Book:

The Aliens Will Come to Georgia First showcases sixteen bizarre, hard-loving stories set in the foothills, pinelands, low country, and barrier islands of Georgia, and a few other places, too. In its pages, a boy and girl find a body on the marsh, a delusional nude model takes on the fight of his life, and a diver visits a sleeping nuclear bomb just a mile from the beach. Tourists eat shrimp and cheer for dolphins while a man falls in love with his television and a handy-woman sees jellyfish-like travelers from outer space.

Hundley’s men and women grapple with death, distant lovers, and damaged families as well as sharks, stray dogs, and man-eating tigers. This debut collection offers an intimate glimpse into a working class, American South populated by people who have made themselves acolytes of existential powers-weapons of mass destruction and alien invasions, the wide ocean and desperate love. This is a book for dreamers and space cadets, fighters and providers, and anyone who believes in a connection between the places we come from and the people we become.

About Stephen Hundley:

Stephen Hundley is a former high school science teacher from Savannah, Georgia, the author of The Aliens Will Come to Georgia First (University of North Georgia Press, 2023), and winner of the 2019 Larry Brown Short Story Award. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Cutbank, Carve, The Greensboro Review and other journals. He serves as the fiction editor for The Swamp and Driftwood Press and is a Richard Ford Fellow at the University of Mississippi.

About David Kirby:

David Kirby teaches at Florida State University, where he is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English. His latest books are a poetry collection, Help Me, Information, and a textbook modestly entitled The Knowledge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them. Kirby is the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement described as “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense” and which was named one of Booklist’s Top 10 Black History Non-Fiction Books of 2010. Entertainment Weekly has called Kirby’s poetry one of “5 Reasons to Live.” In 2016, Kirby received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Florida Humanities, which called him “a literary treasure of our state.”