6th Annual Dalton State Book Festival

The guest author for the 6th Annual Dalton State Book Festival will be Susan Gregg Gilmore, featuring her third and latest novel, The Funeral Dress.  Emmalee Bullard and her new baby are on their own. Or so she thinks, until Leona Lane, the older seamstress who sat by her side at the local shirt factory where both women worked as collar makers, insists Emmalee come and live with her.  Just as Emmalee prepares to escape her hardscrabble life in Red Chert holler, Leona dies tragically.  Grief-stricken, Emmalee decides she’ll make Leona’s burying dress, but there are plenty of people who don't think the unmarried Emmalee should design a dress for a Christian woman - or care for a child on her own. But with every stitch, Emmalee struggles to do what is right for her daughter and to honor Leona the best way she can, finding unlikely support among an indomitable group of seamstresses and the town’s funeral director.
 
Ms. Gilmore will speak on campus Wednesday, March 18 at 6:30pm in the Brown Center, Room 105.  The program will be followed by a reception and book signing. 
Copies of The Funeral Dress are available for check-out at the Derrell C. Roberts Library. 

Please email Lydia Knight at lknight@daltonstate.edu if you have any questions about the book festival.  For a campus map, click on http://www.daltonstate.edu/about/campus-map.html    

The DSC Literary Reading Club will be reading Ms. Gilmore's first novel, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen, " This book is rooted in summer vacations spent with her paternal grandmother and grandfather, a revival-bred preacher, who after church on Sundays always took his granddaughters to the Dairy Queen. The club will meet on Wednesday, March 18 at 2:00pm with Ms. Gilmore to discuss her book.  If you would like to join them, please contact Kris Barton at kmbarton@daltonstate.edu  
 
For more information about Susan Gregg Gilmore, please visit her web site:
http://www.susangregggilmore.com/