Jekyll Island Book Festival

Carla is best known as a former co-host of ABC’s Emmy award winning, popular lifestyle series “The Chew.” She currently appears on ABC’s GMA DAY. She won over audiences when she competed on Bravo’s “Top Chef” and “Top Chef: All Stars” and shared her philosophy to always cook with love. Carla believes food connects us all, and she strives to communicate this through her work, her cooking, and in her daily interactions with others. Born in Nashville, TN, Carla Hall grew up surrounded by Soul Food. When the time came for her to select her career path, she first opted for a business route – she graduated from Howard University’s Business School and worked as an accountant for two years – before deciding to switch gears to work as a runway model. It was during that time, as she traveled (and ate) her way through Europe for a few years, that she truly realized her deep-rooted passion for food could be her career path. Today, she is a trained chef who has worked in several professional restaurant kitchens in and around the Washington, D.C. area and is an accomplished television personality and author. On the literary front, Carla has combined her loves of food, people, and culture to write several cookbooks. Her latest cookbook is Carla Hall’s Soul Food: Everyday and Celebration. She has two previous cookbooks – Carla’s Comfort Food: Favorite Dishes from Around the World and Cooking with Love: Comfort Food That Hugs You. Carla is very active with a number of charities and not-for-profit organizations that reflect her passion for causes close to her heart. Such organizations include Helen Keller International, an organization that works to improve the lives of those with blindness, and to prevent the causes and consequences of blindness, poor health, and malnutrition. She is also the Culinary Ambassador for Sweet Home Cafe at the Smithsonian National Museum for African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. where she works to bring attention to and connects the experience of moving through the museum with the stories and history that inspires the food in the cafe. Carla lives in D.C. with her husband, Matthew Lyons.

Devereaux “Devy” Bruch Eyler was born in Tennessee 1937 and was originally named Nell Howell. Eight hours after her mother, Lena Mae Howell, gave birth, Devy was stolen and sold to a wealthy family through an illegal adoption in the state of Tennessee. Devy’s mother was told she had given birth to a boy who had died during delivery. Years later, with the help of her daughter, Devy was able to learn the truth about her adoption. At the age of 71 she found her biological family and was able to reconnect. Devy felt it was time for her story to be heard so she started piecing together memories with documents and in 2010 she was ready to publish. No Mama, I Didn’t Die: My Life as a Stolen Baby was revised in 2017 to include new information Devy had discovered.

Taylor Brown grew up on the Georgia coast. He is the author of one short story collection, In the Season of Blood and Gold (Press 53, 2014), and three novels from St. Martin’s Press: Fallen Land (2016), The River of Kings (2017), and Gods of Howl Mountain (2018). His story collection was a finalist in the 2015 International Book Awards, and his first two novels were short-listed for the Southern Book Prize. His fourth novel, The Pride of Eden, will be published in 2020. You can find his work in a wide range of publications, including The North Carolina Literary Review, The Bitter Southerner, The Rumpus, Garden & Gun, The Southwest Review, Chautauqua, storySouth, and many others. He is the recipient of a Montana Prize in Fiction, as well as a finalist for the Press 53 Open Awards, the Machigonne Fiction Contest, the Wabash Prize in Fiction, the Rick DeMarinis Short Story Contest, the Dahany Fiction Prize, and the Doris Betts Fiction Prize. Taylor, an Eagle Scout, graduated from the University of Georgia in 2005. He settled in Wilmington, NC, after long stints in Buenos Aires, San Francisco, and the mountains of North Carolina. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of BikeBound.com, the largest custom motorcycle blog in the United States. He likes old motorcycles, thunderstorms, and dogs with beards.

The Jekyll Island Chronicles is an award-winning graphic novel series from Top Shelf/IDW. It is an alternate history/action/adventure tale that takes place right after WWI, and features Jekyll Island as the cornerstone set piece for the story of action heroes battling anarchists in the early 20th century. Part diesel punk, part sci-fi and fantasy, and part weird, historic fact, the series is a classic battle of good versus evil as the world teeters toward global instability and another conflict. Filled with historic figures, new heroes, and horrible villains, it’s a graphic novel series like no other. STEVE NEDVIDEK is a cartoonist, actor, speaker, instructor at Wake Forest University, and coach of innovation and creativity—but he geeks out as an avid builder of models and miniatures. Steve and his wife, Sue, live with their children and dog in Kennesaw, Georgia. ED CROWELL is a quintessential jack-of-all trades: corporate CEO, lobbyist, writer, speaker, adventurer, and white-water enthusiast, who blends his varied experiences into his writing. Ed and his wife, Cynthia, live near the Lost Mountain. JACK LOWE is a student of filmmaking and themed entertainment, and a passionate storyteller with a bent toward immersive, multi-sensory experiences. He, his wife, two dogs, and two cats live in Marietta, Georgia, on the shoulder of Kennesaw Mountain.

Chef Todd Richards is an award-winning chef known for his contemporary cooking style rooted in Soul and Southern cuisine. A native of Chicago and self-taught chef, he was named a 2008 and 2013 Semifinalist for James Beard Foundation Best Chef: Southeast. Richards is the chef and owner of Richards’ Southern Fried and the Culinary Director of Jackmont Hospitality, overseeing award-winning restaurants One Flew South and Chicken + Beer in Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. He has previously helmed the kitchens of prestigious hotels and restaurants including The Four Seasons Hotel Atlanta, The Ritz-Carlton (Atlanta, Buckhead and West Palm Beach), Villa Christina and the Oakroom at the Seelbach Hotel, which garnered the prestigious AAA 5 Diamond Award for restaurant excellence under his tenure. Richards has served as chef/owner of The Shed at Glenwood, The Pig & The Pearl, Rolling Bones Barbecue, White Oak Kitchen & Cocktails and (currently) Richards’ Southern Fried. He is an active Board Member of Wholesome Wave Georgia, the Southern Foodways Alliance and is a founding council member of the Atlanta Food & Wine Festival. Esquire Magazine named him Best Chef to Watch in 2011, Thrillist named him among Best Chefs in Atlanta in 2016 and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution named chef Richards’ most recent restaurant, Richards’ Southern Fried, among the Best New Restaurants of 2017. Chef Richards’ cookbook, “SOUL: A Chef’s Culinary Evolution in 150 Recipes,” published by Time Inc., Oxmoor House Books, was released on May 22, 2018.

Georgia-born French-trained Chef Virginia Willis has made chocolate chip cookies with Dwanye “The Rock” Johnson, foraged for berries in the Alaskan wilderness, harvested capers in the shadow of a smoldering volcano in Sicily, and beguiled celebrities such as Jane Fonda, Bill Clinton, and Aretha Franklin with her cooking – but it all started in her grandmother’s country kitchen.   Virginia is the author of  Secrets of the Southern Table: A Food Lover’s Tour of the Global South, Lighten Up, Y’all,  Bon Appétit, Y’all,  Basic to Brilliant, Y’all, Okra, and Grits. Lighten Up, Y’all: Classic Southern Recipes Made Healthy and Wholesome  received  a 2016 James Beard Foundation Award of Excellence. She is the former TV kitchen director for Martha Stewart Living, Bobby Flay, and Nathalie Dupree; has worked in Michelin-starred restaurants; and traveled the world producing food stories – from making cheese in California to escargot farming in France. She has appeared on Food Network’s Chopped, Fox Family and Friends, Martha Stewart Living, and as a judge on Throwdown with Bobby Flay. She is author of the popular column “Cooking with Virginia” for Southern Kitchen and Editor at Large for Southern Living. The Chicago Tribune praised her as one of “Seven Food Writers You Need to Know.” Her legion of fans loves her down-to-earth attitude and approachable spirit.

Xhenet Aliu’s novel, Brass, was published by Random House in January 2018 and is long-listed for the 2018 Center for Fiction First Book Prize. Her debut fiction collection, Domesticated Wild Things, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction. Aliu’s writing has appeared in Glimmer Train, Hobart, American Short Fiction, Lenny, LitHub, Buzzfeed, The New York Times, and elsewhere, and she has received multiple scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and a fellowship from the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, among other awards, including a special mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology. A native of Waterbury, Connecticut, whose brass industry attracted large waves of Eastern European immigrants before the demise of the factories in the 1970s and ’80s, she was born to an Albanian father and a Lithuanian American mother. She now lives in Athens, Georgia, and works as an academic librarian.