Authors Amplified: Hannah Palmer’s ‘Flight Path: A Search for Roots beneath the World’s Busiest Airport’

Global Atlanta’s Authors Amplified series highlighting Georgia voices in global affairs continues with an in-person interview with Hannah Palmer on her first book released, Flight Path: A Search for Roots beneath the World’s Busiest Airport.

Tickets for the in-person reception are $15 each and include light bites and wine, beer, and water available.

There will be a meet and greet at 5:00 p.m. in advance of the interview at 5:30 P.M. Can’t make it? The interview portion of this event will also be broadcast and viewable free of charge via Zoom. Please select your preferred option when registering.

Sponsored by Gene Kansas Commercial Real Estate:

Hosted by Constellations, home to the Global Atlanta offices: 

About the Book

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.

Palmer’s journey takes her from the ruins of kudzu-covered, airport-owned ghost towns to carefully preserved cemeteries wedged between the runways; into awkward confrontations with airport planners, developers, and even her own parents. Along the way, Palmer becomes an amateur detective, an urban historian, and a mother.

Lyrically chronicling the overlooked devastation and beauty along the airport’s fringe communities in the tradition of John Jeremiah Sullivan and Leslie Jamison, Palmer unearths the startling narratives about race, power, and place that continue to shape American cities.

Part memoir, part urban history, Flight Path: A Search for Roots beneath the World’s Busiest Airport is a riveting account of one young mother’s attempt at making a home where there’s little home left.

About the Author

Hannah Palmer works as an urban designer in Atlanta. She writes about the intersection of southern stories and urban landscapes for venues like Art Papers, Atlanta Magazine, Southern Cultures, and Canopy Atlanta. A graduate of Agnes Scott College, she earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Sewanee: The University of the South. She lives on the southside with her husband and sons. Flight Path is her first book.

About the Series

Georgia’s deep pool of international expertise is sometimes hidden in the ivory towers of academia or overshadowed by looming national figures. Sought-after thought leaders sometimes shine globally while being ignored in their own backyard.

With Authors Amplified, a monthly series of book talks open to subscribers and the public, Global Atlanta showcases authoritative local voices in foreign affairs and international business while highlighting the state’s intellectual contributions to important global conversations.

The Authors Amplified series is presented by the Atlanta Global Studies Center (AGSC), a partnership of Georgia Institute of Technology and Georgia State University, funded in part by a US Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center grant, with a mission to empower the metro region’s global agenda.