Today the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame added four new names to its ranks of the state's most influential literary figures. The inductees include a celebrated non-fiction writer, a Pulitzer prize winning poet and the hall's first-ever lyricist. 

Charter members of the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame include legends like Alice Walker and Margaret Mitchell. This year, non-fiction writer Melissa Fay Greene and poet Natasha Tretheway joined their ranks. Greene is best known for her 1991 book "Praying For Sheet Rock" which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.

University of Georgia history professor Dr. John Inscoe spoke at her induction.

"Praying for Sheet Rock has long been a classic of Georgia history and a model of creative non-fiction. It's the story of how only in the 1970s the Civil Rights movement found its way to a relatively small remote rural community on the Georgia coast, McIntosh County."

In 2007 Tretheway won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for "Native Guard."  It's a collection describing the painful legacy of the Civil War in the deep south.

Dr. Jamil Zainaldin (Ja-mil Zane-ahl-den) of the Georgia Humanities Council described her work.

"Stories told hauntingly through the sustained contemplation of a single aged photograph in which bales of cotton and American flags, black children in freshly starched clothes and the image of an American president merge."

Also during the ceremony, nature writer James Kilgo and famed lyricist Johnny Mercer received posthumous awards.

Tags: margaret mitchell, Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, poet Natasha Tretheway, Melissa Fay Greene, Pulitzer prize