Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Flight Path
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://hannahspalmer.com/
CITY: Atlanta
STATE: GA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
Flight Path author Hannah Palmer on how the airport changed Atlanta’s south side
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2016070135
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2016070135
HEADING: Palmer, Hannah, 1978-
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046 __ |f 1978-08-25
100 1_ |a Palmer, Hannah, |d 1978-
670 __ |a Flight path, 2017: |b prepublication galley title page (Hannah Palmer) information from publisher (birthdate: Aug. 25, 1978)
PERSONAL
Born August 25, 1978; married; children: sons.
EDUCATION:Received degree from Agnes Scott College. Sewanee: The University of the South, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Urban designer and author.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including ATL Studies, CNN, Atlanta Magazine, and Art Papers.
SIDELIGHTS
Hannah Palmer’s mainly works in the field of urban design, and it is this field that influences much of her writing. She has contributed written pieces on the subject to numerous publications, including ATL Studies and CNN.
Flight Path: A Search for Roots Beneath the World’s Busiest Airport serves as Palmer’s literary debut. In an interview featured on the ArtsATL website, Palmer explains that the book blossomed out of several observations and conversations she’d had regarding the changes to Atlanta’s urban and residential landscape over the years, and how many places she’d inhabited and formed memories in over the years were now demolished and gone. Through these conversations, Palmer came across several revelations regarding urban growth within the city, as well as how that impacted race relations and various other related aspects of society.
Flight Path begins with Palmer going back to her formative years by touring the old neighborhoods she occupied and trying to locate where the houses she resided in once stood. All of her former homes were overtaken by the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, which had expanded little by little over the years to the point of overwhelming residential areas. Palmer goes over statistics regarding the airport, from its size to its level of activity, which reportedly averages to thousands of flights and millions of people on a day to day basis. It is from here that Palmer begins to discuss the timeline of the airport’s development, which got its start in the 1960s. Palmer traces that the destruction of so many neighborhoods besides her own can be linked to the airport, which has steadily grown to accommodate the rising number of people who use it each day. Palmer asserts that while the airport has brought major benefits to the city, especially where economics are concerned, the effects the airport leaves upon citizens by displacing them from their homes are equally worth mentioning. In the process, Palmer examines racial relations within the city of Atlanta and how it and the expansion of the airport may be closely, unfortunately intertwined. In investigating this facet of history and society, Palmer laments the effects and contemplates what can be done to resolve this issue. One Kirkus Reviews contributor called Flight Path “[a] thoughtful, eclectic account of what infrastructure progress can leave in its wake.” In an issue of Booklist, Colleen Mondor remarked: “Ultimately, this is a passionate and gorgeously written reminder of why urban planning matters.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer referred to the book as an “enjoyable memoir.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 1, 2017, Colleen Mondor, review of Flight Path: A Search for Roots beneath the World’s Busiest Airport, p. 32.
Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2017, review of Flight Path.
Publishers Weekly, February 13, 2017, review of Flight Path, p. 63.
ONLINE
ArtsATL, http://artsatl.com/ (May 10, 2017), Jodi Lynn Cash, “A conversation with Hannah Palmer, author of ‘Flight Path,'” author interview.
Hannah S. Palmer Website, http://hannahspalmer.com (November 6, 2017), author profile.
Hannah S. Palmer
WRITER, URBAN DESIGNER
HOMEFLIGHT PATHWORKEVENTSCONTACT
Hannah Palmer works as an urban designer in Atlanta. She writes about the intersection of southern stories and urban landscapes for venues like CNN, Art Papers, Atlanta Magazine, ATL Studies, and for urban design and planning projects around the world. A graduate of Agnes Scott College, she earned an MFA in creative writing from Sewanee: The University of the South. She lives near the Atlanta Airport with her husband and sons. Flight Path is her first book.
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ARTSATL > AUTHORS > A CONVERSATION WITH HANNAH PALMER, AUTHOR OF “FLIGHT PATH”
A conversation with Hannah Palmer, author of “Flight Path”
Jodi Lynn Cash- May 10, 2017inAuthors, Books, Reviews
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Hartsfield-Jackson Airport represents precisely the opposite of intimacy. With its sprawling parking lots, bustling terminals and invasive (though sadly necessary) security checkpoints, it’s hard to consider the world’s busiest airport to be personal in any respect. This truth makes the mission of Hannah Palmer’s memoir, Flight Path (Hub City Press, 216 pp), quite ambitious.
Palmer’s debut centers on the history of Atlanta’s airport through the lens of her own relationship to the land the airport annexed. She grew up in Forest Park where 17 years of her life were divided between three homes in the Mountain View neighborhood. Adulthood took her to Brooklyn and back, and she resettled with her husband in Atlanta’s Southside. As a creative writing MFA student and a soon-to-be mother pregnant with her first child in 2008, she spent three years uncovering how the homes of her youth were destroyed to make way for Hartsfield-Jackson’s eventual takeover in her Mountain View community. Her research forced her to look outside of her own former doorsteps and investigate what happened to the Plunkettown, Poole Creek and Blair Village neighborhoods when they too made way for Hartsfield’s expansion. In the process, she reveals the profound implications place has on a person and what poor urban development can do to communities.
Although the premise of the memoir — how a woman’s three homes were impacted by the building of the airport — might seem dry at first glance, Palmer’s vulnerability and lyrical style make the book anything but stuffy. And through this powerful narrative, Palmer conveys the all-important point: people are inextricably influenced by the places they live, and places are defined by the people who live there. Though we often take this reality for granted, it should be a cornerstone of both city planning and storytelling, which is a timely lesson for Atlantans.
In the twentieth century, the growing airport wasn’t the only transportation infrastructure that set specific communities up to fail. The lack of Marta expansion into the suburbs and the paving of highways like the Downtown Connector through the black business district in the ’70s are just two more examples of decisions that made wealth and resources largely inaccessible to the city’s African-American residents. Palmer’s story is no less vital today as city officials and investors (including Palmer herself) anticipate the impact of projects like the Beltline on gentrification in established neighborhoods.
In presenting the human element of this complex conversation about development, Palmer succeeds immensely. It’s sentimental and nostalgic but also critical and thoughtful. She deftly balances considerations of her own history with the broader impact of the biggest airport in the world built on top of Atlanta’s Southside neighborhoods.
ArtsATL spoke with Hannah Palmer about her investigation into the places that molded her as a person, the most consequential structure in our city and what each piece of the puzzle tells about the other.
ArtsATL: How did you manage to make what might seem like a dry topic (the history of the airport and the surrounding communities) and make it incredibly poignant and personal?
Hannah Palmer: In conversations with people about where I’m from, I was doing this unconsciously or without trying too hard. I was saying things like, “Oh yeah, the house where I lost my virginity was bulldozed, and that’s just one of those Atlanta things that happens. The places that matter to you end up getting, ya know, redeveloped or replaced with something that’s kind of disappointing.” So I would tell stories like this just in everyday conversations, and notice a reaction when I was willing to be vulnerable and personal and confessional. I wanted the same effect in my writing.
ArtsATL: After doing a project like Flight Path, how does that inform your role in your current community of East Point?
Palmer: We’ve been in our home for 12 years and made it our own. We love it here. Over those 12 years I have gone from being just a kind of a tourist in local politics to being much more informed and engaged as a citizen, and more opinionated about what needs to happen here. That comes along with my urban design training.
ArtsATL: How did the story expand outside of your personal memoir to tackle complex issues like race and white flight?
Palmer: Well, the book is sort of premised on this exercise of investigating my three lost houses, and if I just follow that trail, it leads to a lot of conversations with white people. My neighbors, my parents, my parents’ friends, their neighbors, people we went to church with. And the first draft of the manuscript, it was all white people talking to white people. And it just revealed to me the depth of the segregation in my own family history and in my own life, it was a strictly white conversation. So I felt the weakness of the manuscript and a real lack of breadth in my first draft. I know that black communities were right next to white communities and they experienced the same displacement that Mountain View did.
ArtsATL: Were you outraged at how under-covered the impact of the airport’s expansion was once you began looking closely?
Palmer: In general, I found myself startled at the scale of the project and that nobody really talked much about it or explained it or understood it.
ArtsATL: What did you learn about the ways that your homes informed who you are as a person? Were there any revelations that really surprised you?
Palmer: After I finished writing the book, I would go back and read it and learn about myself. My husband and his parents are from Forest Park too. My parents went to Forest Park High School. In some ways, the story is our love story, it’s the story of us falling in love, getting married and trying to make a home together. If I had fallen in love with and married some guy from San Francisco, I wouldn’t have written this book! We both ended up on the Southside again, and now we’re trying to raise kids here and trying to understand this attachment to a place. We found a home in each other.
ArtsATL: To me, the problems of gentrification are something you can talk about until you’re blue in the face and still not have a conclusion that works well for everyone. So as someone who was researching this, who is from Forest Park, who now lives in East Point and works on urban planning, how does Atlanta grow and prosper without becoming a place that’s exclusive?
Palmer: It’s a question that all city planners and urban designers think about every single day, and I don’t know the answer . . . I don’t know how to generate that balance and make it last long-term. I feel like cities are either facing the problem of not enough investment or the problems of too much investment. I can’t answer your question — it’s something that I think about a lot, and certainly that’s the goal — to improve neighborhoods, but to make it possible for the people who live there to stay and enjoy those improvements. Whether that’s a new park or dropping in a billion dollar airport in the backyard, the people who live there should be able to enjoy in the benefits.
ArtsATL: What do you hope that adding a personal narrative to describe the impact of the airport might do for urban planning efforts in the city in the future?
Palmer: I hope that this book isn’t just for urban planning professionals or city design professionals; I hope that it’s for a much wider readership of people, and I hope for people who care about the city. So, just broadening that conversation, I hope that it inspires other artists to reflect on the city through their medium — visual, documentary, written, musical. I feel like the arts offer a really powerful role in creating a sense of place, reflecting on the past and creating a vision for the future, and I also want the people who work in positions of power, whether they’re developers or designers or policy people, I want them to read it and understand the human implications of these design decisions, particularly the ripple effect that goes on for generations.
ArtsATL: Tell me about your current work in urban design.
Palmer: I wrote this manuscript before I ever understood the term “urban design.” A friend of mine read the manuscript and told me I was a young Jane Jacobs and should come work for his architecture firm, so I wound up landing a job working on urban projects as a writer, researcher, storyteller and marketer. I’ve worked on urban design projects all over the world, because so much of that work is creating a vision, telling a story, understanding a place. So the tools of being a writer have served me well in that field.
ArtsATL: Do you hope that people begin to care more about the places that inform who they are?
Palmer: Yes, I do. I don’t think everybody needs to go back to their hometown and get involved and make that their place, but wherever you go, you’re part of a community, and I do hope for more active citizen engagement in making better places, whether you’re going to be there for two years or 20 years.
—
Hannah Palmer will discuss her book as well as issues of Atlanta history, urban expansion, and what is lost in the wreckage of development at Charis Books + More this Thursday, May 11 at 7:30 p.m.
Tags: Charis Books + More, Flight Path, gentrification, Hannah Palmer, Hub City Press, Jodi Lynn Cash
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Jodi Lynn Cash
Jodi Lynn Cash
Jodi Lynn Cash is a writer and photographer living in Atlanta, Georgia. She's the editor-in-chief of The Seed and Plate and has contributed to The Bitter Southerner, Kinfolk and elsewhere.
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10/10/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Print Marked Items
Palmer, Hannah: FLIGHT PATH
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Palmer, Hannah FLIGHT PATH Hub City Press (Adult Nonfiction) $16.95 4, 4 ISBN: 978-1-938235-28-3
A young writer retraces her search for former homes lost to a unique form of urban sprawl.In her debut memoir,
Palmer, an Atlanta-based urban designer with an MFA in creative writing, returns to her Georgia roots to explore what
remains of the houses of her youth. Daphne du Maurier's famous line from Rebecca, "we can never go back again, that
much is certain," takes on literal weight here as the author discovers that all three of her family homes were swallowed
up by the encroachment of Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. It is considered the world's busiest
airport; the author reports that in 2014, Hartsfield-Jackson "averaged a quarter million passengers each day, roughly
2,500 daily arrivals and departures...something like three flights per minute." In 1961, Atlanta opened the biggest
passenger terminal in the country, and, at that time, the airport boasted the familiar "giant 'X' " configuration of two
runways that "could not be duplicated or extended." When the airport soon became overcrowded, a new master plan
scrapped the conventional "criss-cross runways" and "starfish-shaped" terminal for a "series of parallel east/west
runways" and linear terminals that increased the land area "fivefold," leading to its present-day 4,700-acre footprint.
Arguing that "everyone uses the airport," but "no one sees it," on her return to Atlanta, Palmer originally thought the
disappearance of one of the communities she grew up in had something to do with gentrification, where socioeconomics
or "racial anxiety" played into the desire of certain citizens to be " 'comfortably south' of people that didn't
look like them." But the more she researched the town's decline and fall, the more she realized the airport's flight path
had "carved an invisible freeway over Forest Park." Throughout, Palmer's clear, engaging prose effectively combines
her private-eye-like adventures with emotional discoveries made as she comes to terms with moments and structures
erased from her past. A thoughtful, eclectic account of what infrastructure progress can leave in its wake.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Palmer, Hannah: FLIGHT PATH." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA482911529&it=r&asid=9ad725a63234ae102a94ea47bdee79af.
Accessed 10 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A482911529
10/10/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Flight Path: A Search for Roots beneath the
World's Busiest Airport
Colleen Mondor
Booklist.
113.13 (Mar. 1, 2017): p32.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
* Flight Path: A Search for Roots beneath the World's Busiest Airport.
By Hannah Palmer.
Apr. 2017. 220p. Hub City, paper, $16.95 (97819382352831.818.
This thoroughly engaging memoir takes a deeply personal look at the neighborhoods around Atlanta's HartsfieldJackson
International Airport. First-time author Palmer discovered that all three of her childhood homes were overrun
by the airport's modern expansions, prompting her to engage in a significant amount of research into its surrounding
history, reaching back over a century, and the social and economic impact of its sprawling design. To be clear, this is by
no means a diatribe against the airport, and Palmer takes great pains to address the positive effect the airport has had on
Atlanta's economy. Readers cannot ignore, however, the graveyard, family homes, small businesses, and, indeed, the
entire notion of neighborhood that have been negatively impacted by its wake. As a native of the region, Palmer casts
an unflinching eye on the altogether forgettable and downright dismal architecture that has usurped what used to be
quiet rural streets while also dipping her toes into Atlanta's contentious racial past. Ultimately, this is a passionate and
gorgeously written reminder of why urban planning matters. Jane Jacobs aficionados will be heartened to know that
Palmer is on the case, while all who read this sparkling gem will keep its message in mind when flying to Atlanta or
any other major hub.--Colleen Mondor
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Mondor, Colleen. "Flight Path: A Search for Roots beneath the World's Busiest Airport." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2017, p. 32.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA488689459&it=r&asid=a0217b3864fa38ec6c550b6bb6192a15.
Accessed 10 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A488689459
10/10/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1507670421444 3/3
Flight Path: A Search for Roots Beneath the
World's Busiest Airport
Publishers Weekly.
264.7 (Feb. 13, 2017): p63.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Flight Path: A Search for Roots Beneath the World's Busiest Airport
Hannah Palmer. Hub City, $16.95 trade paper (210p) ISBN 978-1-938235-28-3
In this enjoyable memoir, Palmer explains that she's a product of the new South who craved a sense of place and
therefore to her hometown of Atlanta. But she found it hard to go home again, as her three childhood houses are no
longer there. Reluctantly at first, she took on the task of locating where they had stood; soon she became obsessed with
understanding the mammoth impact of Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport (ATL) on nearby communities over a
half century. Her amateur sleuthing reveals unpleasant details about the insatiable appetite of a powerful economic
engine like ATL, which acts as a Medusa that turns the area south of Atlanta to concrete. Palmer makes it easy to root
for her and trust her candid insights into questionable policies and current efforts at "airport urbanism." The bigger
question is how to confront her disheartening analysis of postwar America's incessant progress, and "the cost of all
that's been lost" in Atlanta's march to modernity. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Flight Path: A Search for Roots Beneath the World's Busiest Airport." Publishers Weekly, 13 Feb. 2017, p. 63.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA482198207&it=r&asid=87c32ff2c1eda7ff66ff5f1cd41dbf60.
Accessed 10 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A482198207