Flight Path: A Search for Roots Beneath the World’s Busiest Airport

Writer and urban designer Hannah Palmer will discuss her book Flight Path followed by a book signing.

About Flight Path: In the months leading up to the birth of her first child, Hannah Palmer discovers that all three of her childhood houses have been wiped out by the expansion of Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. Having uprooted herself from a promising career in publishing in her adopted Brooklyn, Palmer embarks on a quest to determine the fate of her lost homes—and of a community that has been erased by unchecked Southern progress.

Hannah Palmer is a writer from Atlanta. Her books and essays are informed by her work as an urban designer, always interested in peeling back layers of the built environment to understand the history and wildness that shapes the landscape. Palmer’s work documenting the lost neighborhoods around Atlanta’s “world’s busiest” airport grew into a campaign to restore the hidden headwaters of Georgia’s Flint River. Since 2018, this focus on environmental justice led her to other privatized, segregated, and sullied waters of the urban south. Palmer’s current research and writing outline a growing crisis in access to water and how racial and economic segregation has stunted the growth of communities.

A graduate of Agnes Scott College, Palmer earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of the South. She lives on the southside with her husband and sons.

A SOTA Reading Series Event, made possible through the generosity of the Warren and Ava Sewell Foundation of Bremen, Georgia, whose longstanding commitment to the West Georgia community has brought innumerable benefits as well as having provided for inventive programming. All events are open and free to the public.

Location: University of West Georgia, Campus Center Ballroom 108.2

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