Ben Montgomery

Ben Montgomery Grandma Gatewood's walk WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24 7 PM TAMPA PREPARATORY SCHOOL 727 W Cass St, Tampa, FL 33606 In continuation of their wonderful authors series - which has included luminaries such as Markus Zusak, Jay Asher and Ruta Sepetys - this year Tampa Prep brings Tampa's own Ben Montgomery, author of Grandma Gatewood's walk, an awe-inspiring tale of one incredibly brave and tenacious woman. About the book: Emma Gatewood told her family she was going on a walk and left her small Ohio hometown with a change of clothes and less than two hundred dollars. The next anybody heard from her, this genteel, farm-reared, 67-year-old great-grandmother had walked 800 miles along the 2,050-mile Appalachian Trail. And in September 1955, having survived a rattlesnake strike, two hurricanes, and a run-in with gangsters from Harlem, she stood atop Maine's Mount Katahdin. There she sang the first verse of "America, the Beautiful" and proclaimed, "I said I'll do it, and I've done it." Grandma Gatewood, as the reporters called her, became the first woman to hike the entire Appalachian Trail alone, as well as the first person--man or woman--to walk it twice and three times. Gatewood became a hiking celebrity and appeared on TV and in the pages of Sports Illustrated. The public attention she brought to the little-known footpath was unprecedented. Her vocal criticism of the lousy, difficult stretches led to bolstered maintenance, and very likely saved the trail from extinction. About the author: Ben Montgomery is an enterprise reporter for the Tampa Bay Times and founder of the narrative journalism website Gangrey.com. Montgomery grew up in Oklahoma and studied journalism at Arkansas Tech University, where he played defensive back for the football team, the Wonder Boys. He worked for the Courier in Russellville, Ark., the Standard-Times in San Angelo, Texas, the Times Herald-Record in New York's Hudson River Valley and the Tampa Tribune before joining the Times in 2006. In 2010, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in local reporting and won the Dart Award and Casey Medal for a series called "For Their Own Good," about abuse at Florida's oldest reform school. He lives in Tampa with his wife, Jennifer, and three children.

Location: Street: 727 W Cass St City: Tampa, Province: Florida Postal Code: 33606 Country: United States (afegit de IndieBound)… (més)

Tampa Bay Times writer Ben Montgomery brings us the story of Emma Gatewood, the 67-year-old Ohio grandmother who thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail for the first time in 1955 in Grandma Gatewood’s Walk. She subsequently completed the trail two more times. Montgomery used diaries, trail journals, correspondence, and interviews to piece together the life of this legendary woman. Kirkus Reviews calls Grandma Gatewood’s Walk “a quiet delight of a book.”

Location: Street: 55 Haywood St City: Asheville, Province: North Carolina Postal Code: 28801 Country: United States (afegit de IndieBound)… (més)

In May 1955, Emma Gatewood told her family that she was going on a walk. Then she disappeared. No one heard from the 67-year-old great grandmother for three months, until she informed them by postcard that she had hiked halfway down the 2,050-mile Appalachian Trail. By the time she climbed Maine’s Mt. Katahdin, 145 days from her start in Georgia, this genteel Ohio native, who left without a tent or sleeping bag or map, had become a celebrity across the country. Newspapers, magazines and television reporters were covering every move of the first woman to solo thru-hike the AT. She had faced down rattlesnakes, deadly back-to-back hurricanes and she even spent the night in the Green Mountains with a band of gangsters from Harlem. In the following decade, she became the first person – male or female – to complete the trail twice and three times. At 71, she hiked the Oregon Trail, from Independence, Mo., to Portland, Ore. She told everyone who asked that she started walking on a lark. But there’s a darker motivation she never spoke of. She’d been married for 30 years to an oppressive, hard-fisted man, and when she divorced him she could finally choose her own path. Ben Montgomery is an enterprise reporter at the Tampa Bay Times, and founder of the narrative journalism website Gangrey.com. He's worked at papers in Arkansas, Texas and New York before coming to the Times in 2005. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for a series about abuse at a state-run reform school. I’ve taught writing across the country and my work has appeared in national magazines like PARADE and Seventeen, and on NPR and WNYC’s Radiolab.

Location: Street: 216 S Armenia Ave City: Tampa, Province: Florida Postal Code: 33609-3310 Country: United States (afegit de IndieBound)… (més)