Exploring the Literary Journey of Mary Hood

1. Mary Hood’s first collection of stories is titled How Far She Went (1984), and her second collection was entitled And Venus is Blue (1986). These stories have been reprinted in textbooks. She also pubished a novella called Seam Busters and then later published another collection of stories entitled A Clear View of the Southern Sky. In 1995, Hood published a novel, Familiar Heat, and later published an extensive essay on Northwest Georgia in The New Georgia Guide (1996).

2. The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story says of Hood’s work, “Fifteen of the sixteen stories in her two short story collections are set in the past three decades in Georgia, reflecting the natural and the asphalt landscape.” Hood’s first collection, How Far She Went, was published to acclaim in 1984. Next, her story “Something Good for Ginnie” in the Fall 1985 issue of The Georgia Review. And Venus Is Blue (1986), Hood’s second short-story collection, won both the biennial Townsend Prize for the best fictional work by a Georgian and the Southern Regional Council’s Lillian Smith Book Award for fiction, and that year Hood was named Georgia Author of the Year by the Dixie

Judson Mitcham’s poetry has appeared in journals such as the Chattahoochee Review, Harper’s, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Hudson Review, Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Antioch Review, New England Review, and Southern Review. In 2007, Perkolator Press published Heart of All Greatness, a limited edition letterpress featuring Mitcham’s poems. The New York Times described his second novel, Sabbath Creek, as a “spare, lovely novel” that is “generous in humor yet anchored in sorrow and interspersed with portents of tragedy.” A reviewer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution said “Mitcham has an affinity for people on the margins of life and an ability to look at their lives and see the threads common to us all.” He is the only author to win the Townsend Prize for Fiction