Michael W. Kitchens

Michael W. “Mike” Kitchens was born and raised in Valdosta, Georgia. He is a graduate of the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business where he obtained a Bachelors of Business Administration in Risk Management and Insurance in 1988. In 1991, he moved to Jackson, Mississippi to attend law school at the Mississippi College School of Law. While in law school he clerked at the Mississippi Supreme Court and in one of Mississippi’s most respected law firms. He obtained his Juris Doctor in 1994. It was during the years he lived in Mississippi that he first embarked on his decades long research quest to identify and record the South's lost antebellum homes and plantations. For the last twenty-four years Mr. Kitchens has worked with some of Atlanta’s large and most respected law firms, representing clients in large and complex litigation matters. His legal teams have successfully prosecuted large and complex cases, some of which received national and regional press coverage. He recently left his position with a nationally prominent firm to “hang a shingle” and establish his own legal practice in Athens, Georgia, where he has lived since 2009. In addition to the time consuming task of starting a new law firm in Athens, he has also undertaken the daunting task of writing several new books focusing on historic Southern architecture. His most recent book, Southern Splendor, is published by the University Press of Mississippi. This new book was written with two co-authors and focuses on historic antebellum houses across the South that were once imperiled but were saved by individuals or history-minded organizations. He is also working on the manuscript for a second volume of Ghosts of Grandeur to include more stories and images of over one hundred additional lost antebellum houses in Georgia. Since publishing his first volume of Ghosts of Grandeur, Mr. Kitchens has gained exclusive access to dozens of private image collections that have yielded hundreds of previously unpublished photographs, exposing dozens of additional lost plantation homes which were previously unknown or unrecorded. Moreover, he has begun working on a manuscript for a volume on Alabama’s lost historic antebellum homes and plantations. This volume is expected to include more than 120 essays and over 250 images of the famous, and some not so famous, antebellum mansion houses of Alabama – all now lost. Since publishing his first volume of Ghosts of Grandeur in 2012, Mr. Kitchens has earned national recognition, receiving the Independent Book Publishers Association’s first-place Gold Medal as the nation’s Best New Voice in Non-Fiction at a ceremony in New York City in 2013. He also was recognized by the Georgia Writer’s Association’s in receiving their Silver Medal as the 2013 Best Book on History. He also has been recognized by several Georgia historical societies and preservation organizations for the merit of his book, Ghosts of Grandeur, and its contribution to recording Georgia’s architectural history. Mr. Kitchens looks forward to the continuation of his work in this field as he appears to be perhaps the only researcher/author focusing almost exclusively on publishing comprehensive volumes on the South’s historic lost architecture.