Filmmaker Hal Jacobs’ latest documentary, Northside Tavern: The Mostly True Account of the Golden Age of Atlanta’s Most Exquisite Blues Dive, is an audiophile’s banquet that solidifies his reputation as our city’s auteur of the demimonde. Atlanta, with its historically less-than-intoxicating brew of blue laws, bulldozers and preening aspiration, has never embraced the dive bar as…
In his three previous novels of literary suspense, Christopher Swann writes from the point of view of an affable, slightly hapless everyman who gets caught up in ever-spiraling life-or-death circumstances. Think Alfred Hitchcock, for the post-#MeToo era. A different kind of character emerged in his second novel, Never Turn Back, and she resonated with readers,…
Thomas Q. Jones is the star, executive producer and showrunner of Bounce TV’s tentpole comedy Johnson. Having recently launched its second season, the Atlanta-set hit series, executive produced by Cedric the Entertainer, follows four Black men who met in grade school and have remained best friends: Omar (Jones), Greg (Deji LaRay), Keith (Philip A. Smithey)…
You do not need a deep grounding in colonial misadventure to appreciate Kimberly Brock’s graceful work of speculative, historical fiction — The Lost Book of Eleanor Dare — but it helps to know the few, established facts. In 1587, 117 English men, women, and children landed on Roanoke Island to establish a settlement in the…
Georgia claims one of the highest per capita incarceration rates in the world. In 2008, Sarah Higinbotham, then a Georgia State University Ph.D. candidate, wanted to teach a literature class inside a prison and was surprised to learn that no other program of that kind existed. So she started one herself, and a couple of…
James McMurtry crafts song lyrics of rich poetic resonance, but without a guitar in hand, he is a man of notoriously few words. “He never really opens his mouth all the way,” observes Jason Isbell, affectionately, on a cover he streamed of McMurtry’s “Rachel’s Song,” “so when he’s talking to you, he could be saying…
As Georgia’s film industry has boomed, helpful Facebook groups have sprung up like toadstools after a rain. And like any fungus, they involve a certain amount of fertilizer, in the form of rants, arguments, flirting and self-promotion. If you can scroll through that nonsense — or revel in it if you have time to kill…
Some novels are so forthrightly, languorously Southern that they alter the barometric pressure in the room. Reading The Cicada Tree, which is only one Misfit shy of the Gothic hit parade, you may feel the mercury rise, reflexively mop the sweat from your brow, and scan the sky for signs and portents, that is, when…
Atlanta’s class clowns just became valedictorians. Dad’s Garage has received a prestigious Georgia Governor’s Award for Arts and Humanities, a sure sign of maturity for the irreverent troupe, but do not expect the mischief to stop. “I think it recognizes something very vital to the arts community that we’ve dedicated ourselves to since our founding,”…
Talk about a passion project. AJ and Gillie Jones got engaged in early 2020. Instead of having a lavish wedding, they asked their families to invest the funds intended for the nuptials into a movie. The film, which marks AJ’s directorial debut (he also wrote the script and stars) and Gillie’s first feature acting role,…
ABOUT US / ARTIST ADVISORY COUNCIL / CALENDAR / CONTACT US / DONATE / EVENTS / HOME PAGE /
OUR SUPPORTERS / PRIVACY POLICY / STATEMENT OF EDITORIAL INDEPENDENCE AND ETHICS / STORIES
FOR ADVERTISING AND SPONSORSHIPS, EMAIL DAVID WRIGHT AT DAVID@ARTSATL.ORG
P.O. BOX 8983 ATLANTA, GA 31106
COPYRIGHT 2026 ArtsATL // PRIVACY POLICY
Our weekly arts & culture podcast hosted by Kim Drobes is available for free right here on ArtsATL’s homepage and on all major podcast platforms. New episodes drop every Wednesday so listen and plan your next arts outing!
