Ben Montgomery, who wrote Grandma Gatewood’s Walk, discusses the story of the first woman to thru-hike the entire 2,050 mile Appalachian Trail after telling her adult children she was “going for a walk”. At 67 Emma Gatewood left in sneakers, a change of clothes and $200.  Ben researched her trip through interviews with family, other hikers, with magazine articles (she became famous along the way), and her diaries and journals. The book is a carefully researched and very entertaining story.

Ben Montgomery is author of the New York Times-bestselling ‘Grandma Gatewood’s Walk,‘ winner of a 2014 Outdoor Book Award, ‘The Leper Spy,’ ‘The Man Who Walked Backward,’ and ‘A Shot in the Moonlight.” He spent most of his 20 year newspaper career as an enterprise reporter for the Tampa Bay Times. He founded the narrative journalism website Gangrey.com and helped launch the Auburn Chautauqua, a Southern writers collective.

In 2010, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in local reporting and won the Dart Award and Casey Medal for a series called “For Their Own Good,” about abuse at Florida’s oldest reform school.

Montgomery grew up in Oklahoma and studied journalism at Arkansas Tech University, where he played defensive back for the football team, the Wonder Boys. He worked for the Courier in Russellville, Ark., the Standard-Times in San Angelo, Texas, the Times Herald-Record in New York’s Hudson River Valley and the Tampa Tribune before joining the Times in 2006. He lives in Tampa.

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