Haylow Wins Georgia Author of the Year Award

GRay Stewart's Haylow has won the 53rd annual Georgia Author of the Year Award in the First Novel category. The award was given by the Georgia Writers Association at a banquet Saturday June 3 at Kennesaw State University.

Haylow is a satire based in Atlanta during the 1996 Olympic Games. Its protagonist, a white professor at a historically black college, struggles against his family and the increasingly polarized and corporatized world of "blackacademia." The novel cuts a satirical swath through the booby-trapped territory of race politics in "the city too busy to hate."

Kirkus Reviews calls Haylow, "An amusing and sometimes quite scathing look at academia, racial tensions, and the oppressive weight of the past that still characterizes life in the South."

Foreword Reviews writes, "Through deftly alternating perspectives and with quiet, occasionally biting humor, Haylow depicts Atlanta at the end of the twentieth century, still marked by the Civil War and decades of racial conflict yet moving toward its future as a capital of the New South. Five Stars."

Haylow's arrival is timely, given today's bombastic political rhetoric and palpable racial tension. The novel exposes the thorns in our language and miscommunication that keeps social injustice and personal bias on slow-simmer in daily society.

GRay Stewart is a third generation white Atlantan, who spent more than a decade teaching writing and literature at Morehouse College, a historically black college and the alma mater of DR. Martin Luther King. He also worked as a paramedic at Grady Memorial Hospital, Atlanta's lifeline for the indigent and one of the busiest Level I trauma centers in the country. These experiences have given Stewart a unique vantage point from which to describe "the city too busy to hate."

The novel is available at livingstonpress.uwa.edu, IndieBound, Barnes&Noble, Amazon.com, and area bookstores in trade paperback, ISBN 978-160489-174-4, for $18.95 and in hardcover, ISBN 978-160489-173-7, for $30. For more about Mr. Stewart and his writing, visit www.graystewart.com.

To schedule an interview, reading, or speaking opportunity with GRay Stewart please contact Donna Smith Fee at 706-296-5717 or donnasmithfee@gmail.com. High-resolution JPEG of the book cover and author photo are available by request.

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