THE AWARD-WINNING BOOK BY ESTELLE FORD-WILLIAMSON
Rising Fawn
“RISING FAWN IS A WINNER FROM BEGINNING TO END.”
—William Walsh, Reinhardt University
BOOKS
RISING FAWN
Clare is a professional life coach who tells others how to manage their lives and careers, but loses her home and family through credit card hijacking and a fraudulent loan that create conflict with her irate husband. He kicks her out of their comfortable north Atlanta home; Clare has no option but to flee to the northwest Georgia mountains. She claims a now-deserted trailer on the Alabama side of Lookout Mountain owned by her mother. A journey into family roots—Irish and Italian immigrants working coal and iron furnaces in the South’s bid to industrialize after the Civil War—turns up very surprising stories about Clare’s birth, shaking Clare’s sense of herself even more. She struggles for her true identity in the wildness of mountain ledges and waterfalls. The novel won top novel submission honors at Sand Hills Writers Conference and another prize at the Atlanta Writers Conference.
SEED OF SOUTH SUDAN:
MEMOIR OF A "LOST BOY" REFUGEE
One of the most detailed books on the Lost Boys of Sudan since South Sudan became the world’s newest nation in 2011, this is a memoir of Majok Marier, an Agar Dinka who was 7 when the war came to his village in southern Sudan. Tens of thousands of boys like Majok fled from the Sudanese Army that wanted to kill them. Surviving on grasses, grains, and help from villagers along the way, Majok walked nearly a thousand miles to a refugee camp in Ethiopia, then he and tens of thousands fled to two more countries seeking safety. Majok and 3,400 boys like him emigrated to the United States from 2000 to 2001 while the civil war still raged. In this book, his story is joined to fellow Lost Boys and to others who helped the Boys adapt to the US.
ABBEVILLE FAREWELL:
A NOVEL OF EARLY ATLANTA AND NORTH GEORGIA
A family moving via wagon and horses from the backcountry of South Carolina to Georgia is seeking a new home and the young son Joseph doesn’t understand why. It’s 1822, and the pioneers make their way to a new life in the forests of what will become Atlanta. Later, the railroad opens new ways but also more reasons for struggle between the “moral” people and the hard-drinking, quick-to-fight Free and Rowdy crowd. The Morgans—men and women of faith who just try to keep to lane—are threatened by lifestyles their relatives enjoy, but which are bought on the backs of others. A well-researched novel used as required reading in college history courses, this story based on Georgia and South Carolina history brings the reader to the cusp of the Civil War, and paints the scene for the inevitable conflict. Nominated for the Townsend Fiction Prize and a top novel submission for the Sand Hills Writers Conference.
SIGNED BOOKS
RISING FAWN GALLERY
PRAISE
“Rising Fawn, a novel of suspense Southern-style, is empowering and engrossing.”
— Valerie Sayers, author of The Age of Infidelity and The Powers
BIO
Estelle Ford-Williamson is a novelist and memoirist whose most recent book, set in Rising Fawn, GA, has won awards from the Sandhills Writers Conference and the Atlanta Writers Conference. Her previous books were Abbeville Farewell: A Novel of Early Atlanta and North Georgia, nominee for the Townsend Fiction Prize, and Seed of South Sudan: Memoir of a Lost Boy Refugee, which was co-written with Majok Marier. She has received Poets and Writers Inc. grants for readings and workshops in Atlanta and New York, and has presented memoir
workshops through the Pat Conroy Literary Center in Beaufort, SC, as well as for the Lou Walker Senior Center in DeKalb County, GA. A short story drawn from Rising Fawn was a finalist for the Short Story America Festival in 2017. Born in Chattanooga, TN, Ford-Williamson graduated from Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, IN and worked as a reporter for UPI in Atlanta, where she later worked as a management trainer and career specialist before writing her first novel. She moved to the Beaufort SC area in 2016.