Bill Lightle is Featured Speaker at May 25 Mountain Wordsmiths

             Writer Bill Lightle will be the featured reader for the May gathering of Mountain Wordsmiths. The group will meet Thursday morning, May 25, at 10:30 via Zoom. Lightle is the author of "Race & Politics in the American South: A Personal History."

Bill Lightle

              Lightle lives and writes, both nonfiction and fiction, in Georgia. One reviewer said this of Lightle’s Southern fiction: “Readers everywhere will be captured by his new mystery series.” Another reviewer said his stories are “told with grace and understanding.” 

             In 1966, when he was nine, his family moved from Gas City, Indiana, to Albany, Georgia, where his father had accepted a job building aircraft. Lightle came of age reading newspapers and hearing stories, including those of The Great Depression and World War II, from his father and his friends. It was through these stories that he developed an appreciation for history and politics. 

             After graduating from Georgia Southwestern College in Americus in 1980 with a degree in political science, Lightle was hired as a general assignment reporter for the Albany Herald and went on to write for three other newspapers in the southeast in the 1980s, including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He began a 29-year teaching career in the late 1980s and retired in 2017. But throughout that time, he continued to write for newspapers and publish books.

             For most of his adult life, he has been a political activist, which he chronicles in his latest book, "Race &Politics in the American South: A Personal History." 

             Lightle lives in the country in south Fayette County, Georgia, with his wife Phyllis, their two dogs, Mercy and Levi, and their cat Nigel. His wife has published a book of poetry, "Chasing Hemingway."