Raymond L Atkins Books in Order

Raymond L. Atkins was born on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, but his work has long been rooted in the small towns, back roads, and mountain country of the South. He lives in Rome, Georgia, and many of his stories return to the social worlds of north Georgia and nearby Alabama, where everybody seems to know everybody else's business.

Writing came later for Atkins. He was forty-eight when he sat down to write his first novel, The Front Porch Prophet, and fifty-one when it was published in 2008. That gave him time to gather the sharp observations, odd characters, and hard-won jokes that fill his fiction.

He has taught English at Georgia Northwestern Technical College and creative writing at Reinhardt University. Atkins has also credited teacher Ken Anderson with helping him learn how to write, a debt he acknowledged in the opening pages of his first novel.

The Front Porch Prophet introduced readers to Sequoyah, Georgia, through A. J. Longstreet and his dying friend, Eugene Purdue. It is a story about loyalty, mortality, and an impossible request, but it also makes room for bootleggers, accidents, local legends, and the strange momentum of small-town life. The book received the Georgia Author of the Year Award for First Novel.

With Sorrow Wood, Atkins moved into mystery. Police Chief Wendell Blackmon investigates a killing in Sand Valley, Alabama, while the novel reaches back through his marriage to Reva and the histories that shaped them. The past is rarely settled business in an Atkins story.

His later novels keep changing the setting and stakes. Camp Redemption follows the owners and visitors of a struggling Bible camp in the north Georgia mountains. Sweetwater Blues centers on a young man living with the consequences of a terrible accident and a prison sentence. Camp Redemption received the Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction and the Georgia Author of the Year Award for Fiction in 2014.

Music takes center stage in Set List, which follows a north Georgia rock band over four decades of rehearsals, road miles, bad breaks, friendships, and family life. Atkins also turned to nonfiction with South of Etowah, a collection of humorous essays about the ordinary subjects that can become unexpectedly complicated, including marriage, travel, technology, movies, pets, work, and getting older.

His books tend to be full of people who are imperfect, stubborn, funny, grieving, hopeful, or all four before lunch. They deal with loss, friendship, family history, faith, regret, and the often messy work of carrying on. The humor matters because life is rarely only one thing.

In 2017, Atkins received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Georgia Writers Association. He continues to be closely associated with Rome, Georgia, a place that provides both a home base and a useful vantage point for his writing.