Leah Tyler

1 week ago | ajc.com | Leah Tyler

How does a journalist score a gig jet-setting from country to country — eating dinner at a remote village in Italy and breakfast at a mountain chalet in Slovenia — on a mission to compile a list of the 50 best restaurants in the world?

2 weeks ago | ajc.com | Leah Tyler

Erika J. Simpson writes a compelling scene in her evocative debut memoir “This Is Your Mother” about how a professor dashed her dream of becoming an actor during her freshman year of college. “Acting is a cheap trick,” her professor says after watching Simpson perform an auto-drama depicting her mother’s arrest in a Decatur Walmart when she was 8 years old. “But writing, some things can’t be taught. And you’ve got it, kid.”At the time, Simpson wanted to be a movie star and was crushed.

1 month ago | ajc.com | Leah Tyler |Xhenet Aliu

Xhenet Aliu won Georgia’s most prestigious literary award, the Townsend Prize for Fiction, for her 2018 debut novel, “Brass.” Named a Best Book of the Year by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the multigenerational family drama took place among the abandoned brass factories of her native Waterbury, Connecticut.

1 month ago | ajc.com | Leah Tyler

Bob the Drag Queen is no stranger to innovation. The Georgia native who also goes by the stage name Caldwell Tidicue is the 2016 winner of Emmy Award-winning “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and claims to be the first Black drag queen to garner 1 million followers on Instagram — a number that has doubled since achieving the milestone. In the decade since his reality TV debut, Bob has made public appearances as a comedian, actor, LGBTQ activist, musician and larger-than-life TV personality.

Jan 7, 2025 | ajc.com | Leah Tyler |Rebecca Kauffman

It isn’t unusual for couples to grapple with how to please two sets of parents — or more, if divorce factors into their family histories — over the holidays. It’s hard to make everyone happy, Virginia author Rebecca Kauffman’s fifth novel asserts when single mother Ellen Leach complains about her first Christmas alone post-divorce on a blind date. Ellen isn’t the only reason the date doesn’t go well.