TRMC’s Annual Women’s Event will feature keynote speaker and South Georgia native Frances Mayes, a renowned author best known for her book Under the Tuscan Sun, which was adapted into a 2003 major motion picture.

The Women’s Event will also include free health screenings, information booths, giveaways, and a complimentary brunch. Free and open to all women, the TRMC Women’s Event will be held on Saturday, Aug. 28, from 9 a.m. to noon, at the UGA Tifton Campus Conference Center.

About Mayes

Born and raised in Fitzgerald, Mayes will discuss her life as a poet, essayist, memoirist, novelist, and world traveler. Mayes attended Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Va., and obtained her bachelor’s degree from the University of Florida. In 1975, she earned her master’s degree from San Francisco State University, where she eventually became a professor of creative writing, director of The Poetry Center, and chair of the university’s Department of Creative Writing.

Mayes was an established poetry author before she published the book Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy in 1996. The book is a memoir of Mayes buying, renovating, and living in an abandoned villa in rural Cortona in Tuscany, a region of Italy. It went to number one on the New York Times Best Seller list and remained on the list for more than two years. In 2003, the film adaptation of Under the Tuscan Sun starring actress Diane Lane was released. In 1999, Mayes followed this literary success with another international bestseller, Bella Tuscany: the Sweet Life in Italy, and in 2000 with In Tuscany. Mayes’s first novel, Swan, was published in 2002. With photographer Steven Rothfeld and her husband Edward Mayes, she published the photo text Bringing Tuscany Home in 2004.

Also a food and travel writer, Mayes is the editor of The Best American Travel Writing 2002 and the author of A Year in the World: Journeys of A Passionate Traveler (2006), which includes narratives of her and her husband’s travels in Greece, Turkey, Spain, Morocco, and other countries.

Now writing full time, she and her poet husband divide their time between homes in Hillsborough, N.C., and Cortona, Italy, where she serves as the artist director of the annual Tuscan Sun Festival. A new memoir, Every Day in Tuscany, was released in March.

Registration is not required for this free event. For more information, please call 229-353-6318.