Detailed Event List
Jeannette Walls — Hang the Moon — at Conn Ave
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Most folk thought Sallie Kincaid was a nobody who’d amount to nothing. Sallie had other plans. Sallie Kincaid is the daughter of the biggest man in a small town, the charismatic Duke Kincaid. Born at the turn of the 20th century into a life of comfort and privilege, Sallie remembers little about her mother who died in a violent argument with the Duke. By the time she is just eight years old, the Duke has remarried and had a son, Eddie. While Sallie is her father’s daughter, sharp-witted and resourceful, Eddie is his mother’s son, timid and cerebral. When Sallie tries to teach young Eddie to be more like their father, her daredevil coaching leads to an accident, and Sallie is cast out. Nine years later, she returns, determined to reclaim her place in the family. That’s a lot more complicated than Sallie expected, and she enters a world of conflict and lawlessness. Sallie confronts the secrets and scandals that hide in the shadows of the Big House, navigates the factions in the family and town, and finally comes into her own as a bold, sometimes reckless bootlegger. You will fall in love with Sallie Kincaid, a feisty and fearless, terrified and damaged young woman who refuses to be corralled.
Jeannette Walls graduated from Barnard College and was a journalist in New York. Her memoir, The Glass Castle, has been a New York Times bestseller for more than eight years. She is also the author of the instant New York Times bestsellers The Silver Star and Half Broke Horses, which was named one of the ten best books of 2009 by the editors of The New York Times Book Review. Walls lives in rural Virginia with her husband, the writer John Taylor.
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This event is free with first come, first served seating.
[POSTPONED] Clancy Martin — How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind - with John Kaag — at Conn Ave
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The last time Clancy Martin tried to kill himself was in his basement with a dog leash. It was one of over ten attempts throughout the course of his life. But he didn't die, and like many who consider taking their own lives, he hid the attempt from his wife, family, coworkers, and students, slipping back into his daily life with a hoarse voice, a raw neck, and series of vague explanations.
In How Not to Kill Yourself, Martin chronicles his multiple suicide attempts in an intimate depiction of the mindset of someone obsessed with self-destruction. He argues that, for the vast majority of suicides, an attempt does not just come out of the blue, nor is it merely a violent reaction to a particular crisis or failure, but is the culmination of a host of long-standing issues. He also looks at the thinking of a number of great writers who have attempted suicide and detailed their experiences (such as David Foster Wallace, Yiyun Li, Akutagawa, Nelly Arcan, and others), at what the history of philosophy has to say both for and against suicide, and at the experiences of those who have reached out to him across the years to share their own struggles.
The result combines memoir with critical inquiry to powerfully give voice to what for many has long been incomprehensible, while showing those presently grappling with suicidal thoughts that they are not alone, and that the desire to kill oneself--like other self-destructive desires--is almost always temporary and avoidable.
Clancy Martin is the acclaimed author of the novel How to Sell (FSG) as well as numerous books on philosophy, and has translated works by Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, and other philosophers. A Guggenheim Fellow, his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New York, The Atlantic, Harper's, Esquire, The New Republic, Lapham's Quarterly, The Believer, and The Paris Review. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of Missouri in Kansas City and Ashoka University in New Delhi. He is the survivor of more than ten suicide attempts and a recovering alcoholic.
Martin will be in conversation with John Kaag. Kaag is Donahue Professor of Ethics and the Arts at UMass Lowell and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is the author of American Philosophy: A Love Story and Hiking with Nietzsche, both named NPR Best Book and NYT Editor Choice. His Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living will be published with Princeton in June.
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Jane F. McAlevey — Rules to Win by: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations - with Sara Nelson — at Conn Ave
Rules to Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations is a book for workers, unionists, tenant organizers, racial justice and climate campaigners, academics, policymakers and everyone who wants a more fair and democratic society. Drawing insights from recent hard-won union negotiation campaigns, Jane McAlevey and Abby Lawlor look to the workers leading some of the toughest fights today to provide a masterclass in participatory social change.
In the face of a small committee of middle management and their lawyers, most unions put forward a similarly small committee of worker representatives who negotiate behind closed doors. This book focuses on the nuts and bolts of a different approach: high-participation negotiations. It features six case studies from the last five years: Boston hotel workers, educators in New Jersey, nurses in rural Massachusetts and Philadelphia, reporters from the Los Angeles Times and Law360, and hospital workers in Germany fighting for their patients and their own lives in the pandemic. In each of these cases, workers used the collective bargaining process to achieve transformative contracts through deep organizing and member-driven strategy.
Rules to Win By offers not only a theory of high-participation negotiations, but also practical tools and resources for any campaign. Unlike so many books on negotiations, it encourages us to think beyond the shortcuts of verbal tricks and short-term tactics and to harness the power of ordinary people to win the public good.
Jane McAlevey is an organizer, negotiator, author, and scholar. She is currently a Senior Policy Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley's Labor Center.
McAlevey will be in conversation with Sara Nelson. Nelson has served as the International President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO since 2014, and she is currently serving her third four year term. She first became a union member in 1996 when she was hired as a Flight Attendant at United Airlines and today she represents 50,000 of aviation’s first responders at 19 airlines.
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Liam Callanan — When in Rome - with Abby Maslin — at Conn Ave
Meet Claire: fifty-two, desperate to do something new and get a fresh start. Enter the chance to go to Rome: Home to a struggling convent facing a precipitous end, the city beckons Claire, who's long had a complicated relationship with religion, including a "missed connection" with convent life in her teens. Once in Rome, she finds a group of funny, fearless nuns in a gorgeous villa, beautiful runs throughout a color-saturated city, and a chance to reflect. It all leads her to an unexpected question--should she join the convent?--and an answer that startles her as much as it does those closest to her. It also startles Marcus, a once-buzzy actor, devastatingly handsome, who is eternally in love with Claire. Marcus has come and gone from Claire's life since college but now reappears in Rome just as she's about to decide what's next. As Claire searches for her higher calling, she finds the key to her future may lay in her past--and involves an actual key. The nuns swear it unlocks nothing, but on a night when choices and voices swirl, Claire finds a long-hidden lock. A look at faith, in oneself as much as a higher power, and love, romantic and familial, lost and found, this is the thoroughly charming story of one woman who sets out to rewrite her past and future, only to be surprised by the plot twists life plants . . . when in Rome.
Liam Callanan is a novelist, teacher, and journalist. His novel Paris by the Book, a national bestseller, was translated into multiple languages and won the 2019 Edna Ferber Prize. He’s also a winner of the Hunt Prize, and his first novel,The Cloud Atlas, was a finalist for an Edgar Award. Liam’s work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Slate, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The San Francisco Chronicle, and he's recorded numerous essays for public radio. He's also taught for the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He lives in Wisconsin.
Callanan will be in conversation with Abby Maslin. Maslin is a writer and a public school teacher and the author of Love You Hard. Through her speaking and blogging, she is passionate about bringing awareness to the challenges of traumatic brain injury and caregiving. She lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband and children.
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Alex Mar — Seventy Times Seven: A True Story of Murder and Mercy - with Tope Folarin — at Conn Ave
On a spring afternoon in 1985 in Gary, Indiana, a fifteen-year-old girl kills an elderly woman in a violent home invasion. In a city with a history of racial tensions and white flight, the girl, Paula Cooper, is Black, and her victim, Ruth Pelke, is white and a beloved Bible teacher. The press swoops in. When Paula is sentenced to death, no one decries the impending execution of a tenth grader. But the tide begins to shift when the victim's grandson Bill forgives the girl, against the wishes of his family, and campaigns to spare her life. This tragedy in a midwestern steel town soon reverberates across the United States and around the world--reaching as far away as the Vatican--as newspapers cover the story on their front pages and millions sign petitions in support of Paula. As Paula waits on death row, her fate sparks a debate that not only animates legal circles but raises vital questions about the value of human life: What are we demanding when we call for justice? Is forgiveness an act of desperation or of profound bravery? As Bill and Paula's friendship deepens, and as Bill discovers others who have chosen to forgive after terrible violence, their story asks us to consider what radical acts of empathy we might be capable of. In Seventy Times Seven, Alex Mar weaves an unforgettable narrative of an act of violence and its aftermath. This is a story about the will to live--to survive, to grow, to change--and about what we are willing to accept as justice. Tirelessly researched and told with intimacy and precision, this book brings a haunting chapter in the history of our criminal justice system to astonishing life.
Alex Mar is the author of Witches of America, which was a New York Times Notable Book of 2015. Her work has appeared in New York Magazine, Wired, The New York Times Book Review, and The Guardian, among many other outlets, as well as The Best American Magazine Writing. She was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Feature Writing in 2018. She is also the director of the feature-length documentary American Mystic. She lives in the Hudson Valley and New York City.
Mar will be in conversation with Tope Folarin. Folarin is a Nigerian-American writer based in Washington DC. He serves as Director of the Institute for Policy Studies and the Lannan Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Georgetown University. He is the recipient of the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Whiting Award for Fiction, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other awards. Tope also serves as a board member of the Avalon Theater in Washington DC, the Vice President of the Board of the Pen/Faulkner Foundation, and as a member of the President’s Council of Pathfinder. He was educated at Morehouse College and the University of Oxford, where he earned two Masters degrees as a Rhodes Scholar. His debut novel, A Particular Kind of Black Man, was published by Simon & Schuster.
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P&P Live! Rachel Heng — The Great Reclamation - with Meng Jin
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This event is in partnership with Books & Books & Harvard Bookstore.
Set against a changing Singapore, a sweeping novel about one boy’s unique gifts and the childhood love that will complicate the fate of his community and country
Ah Boon is born into a fishing village amid the heat and beauty of twentieth-century coastal Singapore in the waning years of British rule. He is a gentle boy who is not much interested in fishing, preferring to spend his days playing with the neighbor girl, Siok Mei. But when he discovers he has the unique ability to locate bountiful, movable islands that no one else can find, he feels a new sense of obligation and possibility—something to offer the community and impress the spirited girl he has come to love.
By the time they are teens, Ah Boon and Siok Mei are caught in the tragic sweep of history: the Japanese army invades, the resistance rises, grief intrudes, and the future of the fishing village is in jeopardy. As the nation hurtles toward rebirth, the two friends, newly empowered, must decide who they want to be, and what they are willing to give up.
An aching love story and powerful coming-of-age that reckons with the legacy of British colonialism, the World War II Japanese occupation, and the pursuit of modernity, The Great Reclamation confronts the wounds of progress, the sacrifices of love, and the difficulty of defining home when nature and nation collide, literally shifting the land beneath people’s feet.
Born and raised in Singapore, Rachel Heng is the author of the novel Suicide Club, translated into ten languages. Her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Glimmer Train, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers and has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the National Arts Council of Singapore, among others. She is currently an assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University.
Heng will be in conversation with Meng Jin. Jin is the author of Little Gods, a finalist for both the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award and the Los Angeles Times’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2020; Pushcart Prize XLV: Best of the Small Presses; and elsewhere.
Meg Eden Kuyatt - Good Different - in conversation with Laura Shovan - at Conn Ave in the Children & Teens Department
Selah knows that she is different from the other kids at Pebblecreek Academy. She can’t let people know that loud noises bother her or that some smells are just too much, and she can never, ever, let people see her get upset. Although her Mom and Grandfather support her and she has created rituals to calm herself down, she still feels like she is a wearing a “normal-person mask” to get through each day. But one day her mask slips and she hits a fellow student who touches Selah’s hair without asking. Suddenly, her world changes and all the comforts she has built into her life fall away.
But as Selah starts to figure out more about who she is, she comes to understand that different doesn't mean damaged. With help from a new friend and a new form of self- expression through poetry, she learns to stand up for herself and anyone else who needs her help.
Meg Eden Kuyatt is a neurodivergent author and college-level creative writing instructor. She is a 2020 Pitch Wars mentee, and the author of young adult, middle grade, and poetry books. When she isn’t writing, she’s probably playing Fire Emblem. If she could be a Pokémon, she’s be Chizard. Find her online at megedenbooks.com or on Instagram at @meden_author.
Laura Shovan is the author of the award-winning middle grade novels The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary, and Takedown. A Place at the Table, co-written with Saadia Faruqi, is 2021 Sydney Taylor Notable. Laura is a longtime poet-in-the-schools and is on the faculty of Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Ages 8-12
Victoria Christopher Murray — Pride (7 Deadly Sins #5) - with ReShonda Tate Billingsley — at Conn Ave
Journee Alexander grew up believing that the only person she could depend on was herself. After being abandoned by her mother, burning bridges with friends, and narrowly escaping bad business dealings with her first mentor, her trust is hard to earn and harder to keep. But she has overcome all of that and now, as a successful mortgage broker at the top of her game in Houston's booming real estate market, she has every reason to be proud of her accomplishments. She achieved this massive success on her own--there's no need to put her trust in anyone else. But when Journee starts receiving cryptic text messages from an unknown number threatening to destroy everything she has worked to build, she is out of her depth for the first time. Forced to consider accepting help from someone, Journee turns to the first man she loved, the one who got away. But old habits are hard to break and after trusting only her own instincts for so long, can she put her pride aside and accept advice from an old flame? Or should she put her trust in a brand-new love who is in sync with all that she wants to do? Journee is forced to confront the secrets of her past, the old hurts that never seem to heal, and the fact that sometimes a meteoric rise is just the first step in a devastating fall that will change her life forever.
Victoria Christopher Murray is the New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author of more than thirty novels, including Stand Your Ground, a Library Journal Best Book of the Year and NAACP Image Award Winner. Her novel, The Personal Librarian, which she cowrote with Marie Benedict was a Good Morning America Book Club pick. Visit her website at VictoriaChristopherMurray.com.
Murray will be in conversation with ReShonda Tate Billingsley. Billingsley has made a career out of getting the 411 and spinning a story, hard truths and all. Before writing full-time, she worked as a reporter for The National Enquirer (you wouldn't believe what she's uncovered!) and as an anchor and reporter for NBC, ABC, and FOX television. The author of more than two dozen books, she won the 2012 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Fiction and is a five-time winner of the National Association of Black Journalists Spirit in the Words competition. Visit her online at rumor-central.com.
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Poetry Panel with Jenny Molberg and Sarah Katz - with David Keplinger — at Conn Ave
Jenny Molberg, Sarah Katz, and David Keplinger will be in conversation about their latest poetry collections Court of no Record, Glass, and The Long Answer.
The Court of No Record, serves as both evidence and testimony against a legal system that often fails victims of physical trauma and domestic abuse. Country of Glass is the debut poetry collection from Sarah Katz, who offers an exploration of the concept of precariousness as it applies to bodies, families, countries, and whole societies. The Long Answer is poetry less concerned with explanations or discoveries than it is that we remember what we are.
Jenny Molberg is the author of three poetry collections: Marvels of the Invisible (winner of the Berkshire Prize), Refusal, and The Court of No Record. She edited the Unsung Masters book, Adelaide Crapsey: On the Life & Work of an American Master. She has received fellowships and scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and the Longleaf Writers Conference. Her poems and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Cincinnati Review, VIDA, The Missouri Review, The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, Oprah Quarterly, and other publications. Molberg is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she directs Pleiades Press and co-edits Pleiades magazine. Find her online at jennymolberg.com.
Sarah Katz's poems have appeared in District Lit, the So to Speak blog, Rogue Agent, MiPOesias, The Shallow Ends, and Bear Review, among others. She earned an MFA in poetry from American University and her poetry manuscript, Country of Glass, was named a finalist by former US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky for Tupelo Press's 2016 Dorset Prize. She has contributed essays and articles to a variety of publications, including The Atlantic, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Rumpus, Slate, and others. Sarah lives with her husband, Jonathan, in Fairfax, Virginia, and is Poetry Editor of The Deaf Poets Society, an online journal that features work by writers and artists with disabilities.
Molberg and Katz will be in conversation with David Keplinger. Keplinger is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Another City, which was awarded 2019 UNT Rilke Prize. Among his other collections are The Most Natural Thing and The Prayers of Others, which won the Colorado Book Award. His first collection, The Rose Inside, was chosen by the poet Mary Oliver for the 1999 T.S. Eliot Prize. Keplinger has been awarded the Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, the Erskine Prize from Smartish Pace, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as funding from the DC Council on the Arts and Humanities, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Danish Council on the Arts, and a two-year Soros Foundation fellowship in the Czech Republic. In 2011 he produced By and By, an album of eleven songs based on the poetry of his great-great grandfather, a Civil War veteran. He performed and presented on the project at the National Portrait Gallery's Donald W. Reynolds Center in 2013. His translations of Danish poet Carsten René Nielsen have appeared in three volumes, World Cut Out with Crooked Scissors (2007), House Inspections (2011), a Lannan Literary Series Selection, and Forty-One Objects (forthcoming, 2019). His collaboration with German poet, Jan Wagner, entitled The Art of Topiary was published in 2017 by Milkweed Editions. He teaches in the MFA Program at American University in Washington, D.C
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Thomas W. Lippman — Get the Damn Story: Homer Bigart and the Great Age of American Newspapers — at Conn Ave
In the decades between the Great Depression and the advent of cable television, when daily newspapers set the conversational agenda in the United States, the best reporter in the business was a rumpled, hard-drinking figure named Homer Bigart. Despite two Pulitzers and a host of other prizes, he quickly faded from public view after retirement. Few today know the extent to which he was esteemed by his peers. Get the Damn Story is the first comprehensive biography to encompass all of Bigart's journalism, including both his war reporting and coverage of domestic events. Writing for the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Times, Bigart brought to life many events that defined the era--the wars in Europe, the Pacific, Korea, and Vietnam; the civil rights movement; the creation of Israel; the end of colonialism in Africa; and the Cuban Revolution. The news media's collective credibility may have diminished in the age of Twitter, but Bigart's career demonstrates the value to a democratic society of a relentless, inquiring mind examining its institutions and the people who run them. The principle remains the same today: the truth matters. Historians and journalists alike will find Bigart's story well worth reading.
Thomas W. Lippman is an author and journalist who has written about Middle Eastern affairs, wars, and American foreign policy since the 1970s. He is a former Middle East bureau chief of the Washington Post, and also served as that newspaper's oil and energy reporter. Throughout the 1990s, he covered foreign policy and national security for the Post. Before his work in the Middle East, he was the Washington Post correspondent in Vietnam and Cambodia. He began his career in journalism as a copy boy at The New York Times and also was a reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Lippman is the author of numerous magazine articles, book reviews and op-ed columns about Mideast affairs, and of eight books about the Middle East and Islam. His latest book, Crude Oil, Crude Money: Aristotle Onassis, Saudi Arabia, and the CIA, was published in 2019. Lippman is a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington and was an Edward R. Murrow Journalism Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
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P&P Live! Alka Joshi — The Perfumist of Paris
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Paris, 1974. Radha is now living in Paris with her husband, Pierre, and their two daughters. She still grieves for the baby boy she gave up years ago, when she was only a child herself, but she loves being a mother to her daughters, and she's finally found her passion--the treasure trove of scents. She has an exciting and challenging position working for a master perfumer, helping to design completely new fragrances for clients and building her career one scent at a time. She only wishes Pierre could understand her need to work. She feels his frustration, but she can't give up this thing that drives her. Tasked with her first major project, Radha travels to India, where she enlists the help of her sister, Lakshmi, and the courtesans of Agra--women who use the power of fragrance to seduce, tease and entice. She's on the cusp of a breakthrough when she finds out the son she never told her husband about is heading to Paris to find her--upending her carefully managed world and threatening to destroy a vulnerable marriage.
Born in India and raised in the U.S. since she was nine, Alka Joshi has a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from California College of Arts. Joshi's debut novel, The Henna Artist, immediately became a NYT bestseller, a Reese Witherspoon Bookclub pick, was Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, & is in development as a TV series.
Alexandra Petri — Alexandra Petri's US History: Important American Documents (I Made Up) - with Robert Samuels — at Conn Ave
From the Spanish conquistadors to the Salem witch trials, from Paul Revere's ride to the exclamation mark in Oklahoma!, Alexandra Petri's U.S. History presents a deranged timeline in which John and Abigail Adams try sexting, the March sisters from Little Women are sixty feet tall, Nicola Tesla's friends stage an intervention when he falls in love with a pigeon, and Susan Sontag goes to summer camp. A witty, absurdist satire of the last 500 years, Petri's "historical fan fiction" shows why she has been hailed as "genius,"* a "national treasure,"** and "one of the funniest writers alive."***
Alexandra Petri is a humorist and columnist for the Washington Post and author of Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why, a Thurber Prize finalist. Her satire has also appeared in McSweeney's and the New Yorker's Daily Shouts and Murmurs. She lives in Washington, DC.
Petri will be in conversation with Robert Samuels. Samuels is a journalist and staff writer at The New Yorker. His reporting has taken him to 41 states and three countries, chronicling how political discussions in the nation’s capital affect the lives of everyday Americans. Before joining the New Yorker, he worked for more than a decade as an award-winning enterprise reporter at The Washington Post and their go-to figure skating analyst.
In 2022, he co-wrote His Name is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice with his friend and colleague, Washington Post White House Bureau Chief Toluse Olorunnipa. The book was regularly cited as one of the year's best non-fiction books and was a finalist for the GoodReads Reader's Choice Award, the Audie, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the J. Anthony Lukas Prize as well as the National Book Award.
Samuels grew up in the Bronx and graduated with special recognition from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, where is the only student to have served both as editor in chief of the school newspaper and the black student magazine.
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This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Dr. Lisa Damour & Mary Louise Kelly with Michele Norris — at Sidwell Friends School Robert L. Smith Meeting Room
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In teenagers, powerful emotions come with the territory. And with so many of today's teens contending with academic pressure, social media stress, worries about the future, and concerns about their own mental health, it's easy for them--and their parents--to feel anxious and overwhelmed. But it doesn't have to be that way.
With clear, research-informed explanations alongside illuminating, real-life examples, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers gives parents the concrete, practical information they need to steady their teens through the bumpy yet transformational journey into adulthood.
Recognized as a thought leader by the American Psychological Association, Lisa Damour, Ph.D., co-hosts the Ask Lisa podcast, writes about adolescents for the The New York Times, appears as a regular contributor to CBS News, works in collaboration with UNICEF, and maintains a clinical practice. She is the author of two New York Times bestsellers, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood and Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls. She and her husband have two daughters and live in Shaker Heights, Ohio.
Ever since she became a parent, Mary Louise Kelly has said "next year." Next year will be the year she makes it to her son James's soccer games (which are on weekdays at 4 p.m., right when she is on the air on NPR's All Things Considered, talking to millions of listeners). Drive carpool for her son Alexander? Not if she wants to do that story about Ukraine and interview the secretary of state. Like millions of parents who wrestle with raising children while pursuing a career, she has never been cavalier about these decisions. The bargain she has always made with herself is this: this time I'll get on the plane, and next year I'll find a way to be there for the mom stuff.
This chronicle of her eldest child's final year at home, of losing her father, as well as other curve balls thrown at her, is not a definitive answer―not for herself and certainly not for any other parent. But her questions, her issues, will resonate with every parent. And, yes, especially with mothers, who are judged more harshly by society and, more important, judge themselves more harshly. What would she do if she had to decide all over again?
Mary Louise's thoughts as she faces the coming year will speak to anyone who has ever cared about a child or a parent. It. Goes. So. Fast. is honest, funny, poignant, revelatory, and immensely relatable.
Mary Louise Kelly has been reporting for NPR for nearly two decades and is now cohost of All Things Considered. She has also written the suspense novels Anonymous Sources and The Bullet, and is the author of articles and essays that have appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, among numerous other publications. A Georgia native, Kelly graduated from Harvard University with degrees in government and French language and literature and completed a master's degree in European studies at the University of Cambridge in England. She created and taught a graduate course on national security and journalism at Georgetown University. In addition to her NPR work, Kelly has served as a contributing editor at the Atlantic, moderating news-maker interviews at forums from Aspen to Abu Dhabi.
Damour and Kelly will be in conversation with Michele Norris. Norris is one of the most trusted voices in journalism. She is a Columnist for The Washington Post Opinion Section, a celebrated author and the host of an upcoming podcast with Higher Ground Productions called Your Mama’s Kitchen. Her voice will be familiar to followers of public radio, where from 2002 to 2012 she was a host of National Public Radio’s afternoon magazine show, All Things Considered. Norris is also the Founding Director of The Race Card Project™, a Peabody Award Winning narrative archive where half a million people from all around the world have shared their experiences, questions, hopes, dreams, laments, and observations about identity --in just six words--as the starting point for conversations about race and belonging. The author of the The Grace of Silence, her upcoming book, tentatively titled Tell Me What You Really Think, is scheduled to be released by Simon & Schuster in October of 2023. Based on her work at The Race Card Project™, her next book explores America’s hidden conversation about race and identity during the period bookended by the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
All tickets include a book.
The authors will be signing books following the event.
Attendees are encouraged to follow COVID guidance provided by the school while on campus.
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Lulu Delacre - Cool Green & Verde Fresco - At Conn Ave
Which is the tallest tree in the world? Which one is the heaviest? How can a tree have bark like a rainbow? What tree goes back to the time of the dinosaurs? Do trees talk to each other? Learn the answers to these and more intriguing questions in this bilingual program celebrating Cool Green: Amazing, Remarkable Trees/Verde Fresco: Árboles asombrosos y extraordinarios. Lulu will explain the process of creating Cool Green and Verde fresco and reveal how to tap into your heritage and interests to come up with stories.
Lulu Delacre was born in Puerto Rico to Argentinian parents. She is an award-winning author and illustrator whose works include Arroz con Leche: Popular Songs and Rhymes from Latin America, a Horn Book Fanfare Book in print for 30 years. She also illustrated Turning Pages by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Delacre has exhibited at The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art; The Original Art Show at the Society of Illustrators in New York; the Museum of Art of Puerto Rico and the Zimmerli Art Museum; among other venues.
Ages 4-8
This event is free to attend and open to the public, however, reservations are required for school groups interested in attending. Seating is available on a first come, first served basis.
The Atlantic Editions Launch — Derek Thompson — On Work: Money, Meaning, Identity - with Ross Andersen — at Conn Ave
On Work gathers a selection of Derek Thompson’s most popular and significant writing on work, life, and the future of jobs. From essays on how mass automation could change society to his widely read treatise on “workism” as our modern religion, Thompson’s analysis and forecasts have become fixtures of the twenty-first century conversation about work.
Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he publishes the newsletter “Work in Progress” on science, tech, and culture. He is the founder and host of the popular news podcast Plain English with Derek Thompson. A news analyst with NPR, Derek appears weekly on the national news show Here and Now and is also a contributor to CBS News. His first book, the national bestseller Hit Makers: How to Succeed in an Age of Distraction, has been translated into more than a dozen languages and was named the 2018 Book of the Year by the American Marketing Association. Derek lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and dog.
Thompson will be in conversation with Ross Andersen. Andersen is the deputy editor of The Atlantic.
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This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Maggie Smith — You Could Make This Place Beautiful - with Kate Baer — at Conn Ave
In her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself in lyrical vignettes that shine, hard and clear as jewels. The book begins with one woman's personal, particular heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist even in many progressive homes. With the spirit of self-inquiry and empathy she's known for, Smith interweaves snapshots of a life with meditations on secrets, anger, forgiveness, and narrative itself. The power of these pieces is cumulative: page after page, they build into a larger interrogation of family, work, and patriarchy.
You Could Make This Place Beautiful, like the work of Deborah Levy, Rachel Cusk, and Gina Frangello, is an unflinching look at what it means to live and write our own lives. It is a story about a mother's fierce and constant love for her children, and a woman's love and regard for herself. Above all, this memoir is an argument for possibility. With a poet's attention to language and an innovative approach to the genre, Smith reveals how, in the aftermath of loss, we can discover our power and make something new. Something beautiful.
Maggie Smith is the award-winning author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, and the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Smith has also received several Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has been widely published, appearing in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Poetry, and more. You can follow her on social media @MaggieSmithPoet.
Smith will be in conversation with Kate Baer, the 3x New York Times bestselling author of What Kind Of Woman, I Hope This Finds You Well, & And Yet. Her work has also been published in The New Yorker, Literary Hub, Huffington Post and The New York Times.
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This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Curtis Sittenfeld — Romantic Comedy - with Martine Powers — at Sixth & I
Click here for tickets to this in-person event (with the option for virtual attendance).
A book signing will follow the event.
Sally Milz, a sketch writer for the weekly late-night comedy show “The Night Owls,” has long abandoned the search for love. But when Sally’s fellow writer begins dating a glamorous actress, he joins the group of talented but average-looking men at the show—and in society at large—who’ve gotten romantically involved with incredibly beautiful and accomplished women. Sally channels her annoyance into a sketch underscoring how unlikely it is that the reverse would ever happen for a woman.
Enter this week’s host and musical guest, Noah Brewster, a pop music sensation with a reputation for dating models. Sally hits it off with Noah instantly, and she begins to wonder if there might actually be sparks. But this isn’t a romantic comedy—it’s real life. And in real life, someone like him would never date someone like her…right?
With her trademark ability to bring complex women to life on the page, Curtis Sittenfeld, the New York Times bestselling author of Rodham, Prep, and Eligible, explores the neurosis-inducing wonder of love while dissecting the social rituals of romance and gender relations in the modern age in her latest novel, Romantic Comedy.
Sittenfeld will be in conversation with Martine Powers, the senior host of “Post Reports,” The Washington Post‘s flagship daily news podcast.
with Politics and Prose
Heather Murphy Capps - Indigo and Ida - in conversation with Carrie Callaghan - at Conn Ave in the Children and Teens Department
During her undercover investigation into her school’s detention policies, Indigo discovers letters from Ida B. Wells in a biography about the Black activist and journalist. Spurred on by a surge in popularity, Indigo decides to run for student president. But she has to decide if she would rather win the election or stick to her principles and run on the issues that are important to her -- the same ones that drove Ida.
Heather Murphy Capps has been a television news reporter and a mayoral press secretary and now lives in Northern Virginia with her two children, cats, cows and husband. She’s also an administrator/contributor to the book blog From the Mixed-Up Files … of Middle-Grade Authors, where she created and now curates the series We Need Diverse MG. Heather writes about history, social justice, science, and magic. This is her debut novel.
Carrie Callaghan is the author of the historical novels A Light of Her Own and Salt the Snow. Her short stories have been published in multiple literary journals, and she is a senior editor with the Washington Independent Review of Books. She lives in Maryland with her family and three ridiculous cats. She loves seasons of all kinds, history, and tea.
Preorder a copy of Indigo & Ida or purchase at the event to receive a signed copy and a swag pack that includes a bell, a turtle and a bookmark! If you're having the book shipped, we'll send out the signed book and swag pack after the event!
Ages 10-13
Henri Cole — Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, 1994-2022 — at Conn Ave
The poems collected in Gravity and Center represent thirty years of work by one of America's finest living poets. Henri Cole has reconceived and mastered his own version of the sonnet. As he explains in his afterword, "I believe a poem is a sonnet if it behaves like one, and this doesn't mean rhyming iambic pentameter lines. More important is the psychological dimension, the little fractures and leaps and resolutions the poem enacts . . . For some reason the lean, muscular body of the sonnet frees me to be simultaneously dignified and bold, to appear somewhat socialized though what I have to say may be eccentric or unethical, and, most important of all, to have aesthetic power while writing about the tragic situation of the individual in the world." Cole is both confessional and abstract, intimate and cosmopolitan, astringent and open to beauty. Whether he is writing about the contingencies of selfhood, the lives of animals and plants, or the violent events of the world, there is always the incandescence of language.
Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, to a French mother and an American father. He has published ten previous collections of poetry and received many awards, including the Jackson Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, the Lenore Marshall Award, and the Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has also published Orphic Paris, a memoir. He lives in Boston and teaches at Claremont McKenna College.
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This event is free with first come, first served seating.
The Kennedy Center's RiverRun Festival — FLOW Literary Series — at The Kennedy Center
FLOW is a three-part series taking place April 14th and 15th. Tickets must be purchased separately for each event.
Rivers and waterways have inspired storytelling since human history began on the banks of majestic estuaries. RiverRun’s Literary Series, curated by author Marie Arana, celebrates great written works that reflect the beauty and importance of our waters. “FLOW” is a three-part series that looks at writing about water from markedly different perspectives, including science, art, fiction, adventure, and the environment.
In addition to LEONARDISSIMO! in the Eisenhower Theater on April 14, two programs will be presented on April 15 featuring distinguished writers who address rivers and oceans in distinct ways.
The Waters We Need to Save will address the intricacy of nature, the urgency of climate change, the specificity—yet interdependence—of place, the all too human connections we make with the Earth’s rivers and seas, and how literature can bring all these themes alive. Moderated by Marie Arana, this program includes W. Ralph Eubanks, memoirist and novelist of life along the Mississippi; Delia Owens, author of Where the Crawdads Sing; Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News as well as her brand new Fen, Bog & Swamp; and science and travel writer David Quammen, author of The Chimp and the River and The Tangled Tree, as well as hundreds of published articles on the earth’s natural wonders.
The other program, The Waters We Seek to Master, will focus on exploration, discovery, the history and science of our waterways, and the very human stories that emerge in our encounters with the Earth’s rivers and seas.
Book signings will follow the events in partnership with Politics and Prose.
LEONARDISSIMO! —Leonardo da Vinci’s World and Its Waters
Apr 14, 8 pm, The Kennedy Center, Eisenhower Theater
Part of RiverRun’s “FLOW” Literary Series curated by Marie Arana, this stunning multimedia presentation about Leonardo da Vinci delves into the great master’s obsession with water.
Click here to purchase tickets
“FLOW”—Literary Series: The Waters We Seek to Master
Apr 15, 11 am, The Kennedy Center, Family Theater
RiverRun’s Literary Series, curated by author Marie Arana and featuring acclaimed guest authors, celebrates great written works that reflect the beauty and importance of our waters. The Waters We Seek to Master will focus on adventure, history, and memoir.
Click here to purchase tickets
“FLOW”—A Literary Series: The Waters We Need to Save
April 15th, 2023, 2 pm, The Kennedy Center, Family Theater
RiverRun’s Literary Series, curated by author Marie Arana and featuring acclaimed guest authors, celebrates great written works that reflect the beauty and importance of our waters. The Waters We Need to Save will address exploration, climate change, and related fiction.
The Kennedy Center's RiverRun Festival — FLOW Literary Series — at The Kennedy Center
FLOW is a three-part series taking place April 14th and 15th. Tickets must be purchased separately for each event.
Rivers and waterways have inspired storytelling since human history began on the banks of majestic estuaries. RiverRun’s Literary Series, curated by author Marie Arana, celebrates great written works that reflect the beauty and importance of our waters. “FLOW” is a three-part series that looks at writing about water from markedly different perspectives, including science, art, fiction, adventure, and the environment.
In addition to LEONARDISSIMO! in the Eisenhower Theater on April 14, two programs will be presented on April 15 featuring distinguished writers who address rivers and oceans in distinct ways.
The Waters We Need to Save will address the intricacy of nature, the urgency of climate change, the specificity—yet interdependence—of place, the all too human connections we make with the Earth’s rivers and seas, and how literature can bring all these themes alive. Moderated by Marie Arana, this program includes W. Ralph Eubanks, memoirist and novelist of life along the Mississippi; Delia Owens, author of Where the Crawdads Sing; Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News as well as her brand new Fen, Bog & Swamp; and science and travel writer David Quammen, author of The Chimp and the River and The Tangled Tree, as well as hundreds of published articles on the earth’s natural wonders.
The other program, The Waters We Seek to Master, will focus on exploration, discovery, the history and science of our waterways, and the very human stories that emerge in our encounters with the Earth’s rivers and seas.
Book signings will follow the events in partnership with Politics and Prose.
LEONARDISSIMO! —Leonardo da Vinci’s World and Its Waters
Apr 14, 8 pm, The Kennedy Center, Eisenhower Theater
Part of RiverRun’s “FLOW” Literary Series curated by Marie Arana, this stunning multimedia presentation about Leonardo da Vinci delves into the great master’s obsession with water.
Click here to purchase tickets
“FLOW”—Literary Series: The Waters We Seek to Master
Apr 15, 11 am, The Kennedy Center, Family Theater
RiverRun’s Literary Series, curated by author Marie Arana and featuring acclaimed guest authors, celebrates great written works that reflect the beauty and importance of our waters. The Waters We Seek to Master will focus on adventure, history, and memoir.
Click here to purchase tickets
“FLOW”—A Literary Series: The Waters We Need to Save
April 15th, 2023, 2 pm, The Kennedy Center, Family Theater
RiverRun’s Literary Series, curated by author Marie Arana and featuring acclaimed guest authors, celebrates great written works that reflect the beauty and importance of our waters. The Waters We Need to Save will address exploration, climate change, and related fiction.
Steven Simon — Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East - in conversation with Aaron David Miller — at Conn Ave
Grand Delusion reveals that this story, while episodically impressive, was too often tragic and at times dishonorable. As we enter a new era in foreign policy, this is an essential book, a cautionary history that illuminates American's propensity for self-deception and misadventure at a moment when the nation is redefining its engagement with a world in crisis.
Steven Simon served on the National Security Council staff as senior director for Middle Eastern and North African affairs 2011-2012. He also worked on the NSC staff 1994-1999 on counterterrorism and Middle East security policy. These assignments followed a fifteen-year career at the U.S. Department of State. Between government assignments, he was Hasib Sabbagh senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, analyst at the RAND Corporation, and deputy director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies; he is currently a professor at Colby College. He is the co-author, among other books, of The Age of Sacred Terror, winner of the Arthur C. Ross Award for best book in international relations.
Simon will be joined in conversation with Aaron David Miller, vice president for new initiatives and a distinguished fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center, served for two decades as a State Department analyst, negotiator and adviser on Middle East issues.
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This event is free with first come, first served seating.
David O. Stewart — The Burning Land - with Eugenia Kim — at Conn Ave
In 1861, Henry and Katie have found love on the rugged Maine coast. He builds boats. She wants to teach school whenever her family duties relent. Their hearts are light and the future looks bright. Then America explodes in civil war. At first surprised by Katie's anti-slavery feelings, then persuaded, Henry enlists in the 20th Maine Infantry, fated to become a legendary regiment in the Union Army. Staggering through a dozen brutal battles, including the desperate defense of Little Round Top at Gettysburg, he rises to sergeant. Katie, working on short-term teaching contracts, organizes neighbor women to make warm items for Maine's men in uniform. Quiet letters between Henry in army camps and Katie at home strengthen their love. Finally receiving a brief furlough, he hurries home for a rushed wedding and precious hours as man and wife.
But history's grip is fierce. A ghastly battlefield wound ends Henry's war. Katie nurses him through a long recuperation, but they cannot agree--should they return to Maine or join America's mad flight westward? Ultimately transplanted to booming Chicago, little goes right for them in that overnight metropolis, which will test their strength and commitment as never before.
A recovering lawyer and proud graduate of Curtis High School on Staten Island, David Stewart has published five books of history. The Burning Land, his fifth historical novel, is Book 2 of a trilogy, The Overstreet Saga, inspired by family stories his mother told. David's most recent nonfiction work, George Washington: The Political Rise of America’s Founding Father, has won several awards and was a finalist for Mount Vernon’s George Washington Prize. He lives in Maryland with his wife of 48 years, Nancy Floreen; they have three children and six grandchildren.
Stewart will be in conversation with Eugenia Kim. Kim’s debut novel, The Calligrapher’s Daughter, won the Borders Original Voices Award, was shortlisted for the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was a Washington Post Best Historical Novel and Critic’s Pick. Her second novel, The Kinship of Secrets, was a Library Reads best book of November and Hall of Fame list for 2018, and an Amazon Best Book of the Month/Literature and Fiction. She is a two-time Washington DC Council on the Arts and Humanities Fellowship recipient, and received fellowships at Yaddo, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and elsewhere. Ms. Kim teaches fiction and nonfiction at Fairfield University’s MFA Creative Writing Program.
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This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Sally Bedell Smith — George VI and Elizabeth: The Marriage That Saved the Monarchy — at Conn Ave
Granted special access by Queen Elizabeth II to her parents' letters and diaries and to the papers of their close friends and family, Sally Bedell Smith brings the love story of this iconic royal couple to vibrant life. This deeply researched and revealing book shows how a loving and devoted marriage helped the King and Queen meet the challenges of World War II, lead a nation, solidify the public's faith in the monarchy, and raise their daughters, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret.
When King Edward VIII abdicated the throne in 1936, shattering the Crown's reputation, his younger brother, known as Bertie, assumed his father's name and became King George VI. Shy, sensitive, and afflicted with a stutter, George VI had never imagined that he would become King. His wife, Elizabeth, a pretty, confident, and outgoing woman who became known later in life as "the Queen Mum," strengthened and advised her husband. With his wife's support, guidance, and love, George VI was able to overcome his insecurities and become an exceptional leader, navigating the country through World War II, establishing a relationship with Winston Churchill, visiting Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt in Washington and in Hyde Park, and inspiring the British people with his courage and compassion during the Blitz. Simultaneously, George VI and Elizabeth trained their daughter Princess Elizabeth from an early age to be a highly successful monarch, and she would reign for an unprecedented seventy years. Sally Bedell Smith gives us an inside view of the lives, struggles, hopes, and triumphs of King George VI and Elizabeth during a dramatic time in history.
Sally Bedell Smith is the New York Times bestselling author of Elizabeth the Queen and Prince Charles, as well as biographies of William S. Paley; Pamela Harriman; Diana, Princess of Wales; John and Jacqueline Kennedy; and Bill and Hillary Clinton. An on-air contributor for CNN since 2017, she was a contributing editor at Vanity Fair from 1996 to 2018.
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This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Neil King, Jr. — American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal - in conversation with Helene Cooper — at Conn Ave
Neil King Jr.'s desire to walk from Washington, D.C., to New York City began as a whim and soon became an obsession. By the spring of 2021, events had intervened that gave his desire greater urgency. His neighborhood still reeled from the January 6th insurrection. Covid lockdowns and a rancorous election had deepened America's divides. Neil himself bore the imprints of a long battle with cancer. Determined to rediscover what matters in life and to see our national story with new eyes, Neil turned north with a small satchel on his back and one mission in mind: To pay close attention to the land he crossed and the people he met.
What followed is an extraordinary 26-day journey through historic battlefields and cemeteries, over the Mason-Dixon line, past Quaker and Amish farms, along Valley Forge stream beds, atop a New Jersey trash mound, across New York Harbor, and finally, to his ultimate destination: the Ramble, where a tangle of pathways converges in Central Park. The journey travels deep into America's past and present, uncovering forgotten pockets and overlooked people. At a time of mounting disunity, the trip reveals the profound power of our shared ground. By turns amusing, inspiring, and sublime, American Ramble offers an exquisite account of personal and national renewal--an indelible study of our country as we've never seen it before.
Neil King is the Wall Street Journal's global economics editor. Mr. King has worked for 15 years in the Journal's Washington bureau, where he has covered beats ranging from terrorism and foreign policy to trade and the international oil industry. He served as national political reporter from 2010 until early 2014, when he took over as editor of the Journal's economics coverage. Mr. King first joined Dow Jones in January 1995 as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal Europe, based in Prague. In November of that year, he moved to Brussels as chief correspondent of the European Journal’s Central European Economic Review. In 1996, he became the European Journal’s chief diplomatic and security correspondent. Prior to joining Dow Jones, Mr. King was a staff reporter for the Tampa (Fla.) Tribune in 1990 and moved to Prague in 1992 as a freelance correspondent. He did freelance reporting for the European Journal from Prague from1993 to 1994. Born in Colorado, Mr. King earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Columbia University in New York and a master’s degree from the Medill Graduate School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.
King will be joined in conversation with, Helene Cooper, a New York Times Pentagon reporter and author of the bestselling memoir, “The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood.” Her work in Liberia covering the Ebola epidemic was part of a package that won the Pulitzer Prize. Her most recent book is “Madame President: The Extraordinary Story of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.”.
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This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Dionne Ford — Go Back and Get It: A Memoir of Race, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Healing - with W. Ralph Eubanks — at Conn Ave
Countless Black Americans descended from slavery are related to the enslavers who bought and sold their ancestors. Among them is Dionne Ford, whose great grandmother was the last of six children born to a Louisiana cotton broker and the enslaved woman he received as a wedding gift. What shapes does this kind of intergenerational trauma take? In these pages, which move between her inner life and deep research, Ford tells us. It manifests as alcoholism and post-traumatic stress; it finds echoes in her own experience of sexual abuse at the hands of a relative, and in the ways in which she builds her own interracial family. To heal, Ford tries a wide range of therapies, lifestyle changes, and recovery meetings. "Anything," she writes, "to keep from going back there." But what she learns is that she needs to go back there, to return to her female ancestors, and unearth what she can about them to start to feel whole.
Dionne Ford is an NEA creative writing fellow and the co-editor of the anthology Slavery's Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation (Rutgers University Press). Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Literary Hub, New Jersey Monthly, the Rumpus, and Ebony and won awards from the National Association of Black Journalists and the Newswomen's Club of New York. She holds a BA from Fordham University and an MFA from New York University. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and daughters.
Ford will be in conversation with W. Ralph Eubanks. Eubanks is faculty fellow and writer-in-residence at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through A Real and Imagined Literary Landscape as well as two other works of nonfiction. A writer and essayist whose work focuses on race, identity, and the American South, his writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, The American Scholar, The Georgia Review, and The New Yorker. He is a 2007 Guggenheim fellow and a 2021-2022 Harvard Radcliffe Institute fellow.
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This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Christine Grillo — Hestia Strikes a Match - with Angie Kim — at Conn Ave
Unionists against Confederates, children against parents, friends against friends: The year is 2023 and the United States has collapsed into another bloody civil war. Hestia Harris is forty, newly single by virtue of abandonment for the Union cause, and her parents are absconding to the Confederacy. She is adrift, save for her coworkers at the retirement village and her best friend, Mildred, an eighty-four-year-old resident, who gleefully supports Hestia's somewhat half-hearted but nonetheless hopeful attempts to find love in a time of chaos and disunion. Let's Not Date a Confederate! Hestia avers as her parents put up a sign proclaiming Make Liberals Feel Sad and Mildred reminds her It'll pass . . . It always does. For fans of Maria Semple, Andrew Sean Greer, Ling Ma, and Gail Honeyman, Christine Grillo's Hestia Strikes a Match is an irreverent, incisive, laugh-out-loud interrogation of modern love of all kinds, in all its messy beauty. As it fills your heart to fend off despair, it asks the seemingly ever-relevant question: How do you embrace an entire life when the whole world is breaking into bits and madness?
Christine Grillo is a writer and editor covering food systems, agriculture, and climate change, whose nonfiction has been published in outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic: CityLab, Audubon, NextTribe, and Real Simple. Her short fiction has appeared in Story Quarterly, The Southern Review, and LIT. Hestia Strikes a Match is her debut novel.
Grillo will be in conversation with Angie Kim. Kim is the debut author of the international bestseller and Edgar winner Miracle Creek, named a "Best Book of the Year" by Time, The Washington Post, Kirkus, and The Today Show, among others. Her novel also won the ITW Thriller Award, the Strand Critics’ Award, and the Pinckley Prize, and is being translated into 20 languages. A Korean immigrant, former editor of the Harvard Law Review, and one of Variety Magazine’s inaugural “10 Storytellers to Watch,” Kim has written for Vogue, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Glamour, and numerous literary journals. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and three sons. Visit her website at www.angiekimbooks.com.
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This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Rebecca Makkai — I Have Some Questions for You - with Angie Kim — at Conn Ave
A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past--the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the murder of her former roommate, Thalia Keith, in the spring of their senior year. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia's death and the conviction of the school's athletic trainer, Omar Evans, are hotly debated online, Bodie prefers--needs--to let sleeping dogs lie. But when the Granby School invites her back to teach a course, Bodie is inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent flaws. In their rush to convict Omar, did the school and the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there? As she falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie begins to wonder if she wasn't as much of an outsider at Granby as she'd thought--if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case. In I Have Some Questions for You, award-winning author Rebecca Makkai has crafted her most irresistible novel yet: a stirring investigation into collective memory and a deeply felt examination of one woman's reckoning with her past, with a transfixing mystery at its heart. Timely, hypnotic, and populated with a cast of unforgettable characters, I Have Some Questions for You is at once a compulsive page-turner and a literary triumph.
A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, Rebecca Makkai is on the MFA faculties of the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe and Northwestern University, and is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.Her last novel, The Great Believers, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; it was the winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal, the Stonewall Book Award, the Clark Prize, and the LA Times Book Prize; and it was one of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of 2018. Her other books are the novels The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House, and the collection Music for Wartime—four stories from which appeared in The Best American Short Stories.
Makkai will be in conversation with Angie Kim. Kim is a Korean immigrant, former editor of the Harvard Law Review, and author of the international bestseller and Edgar Award winner Miracle Creek, which has been translated into over 20 languages and named a "Best Book of the Year" by Time, The Washington Post, Kirkus, and The Today Show. She has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Vogue, and Glamour, among many others. Her second novel, Happiness Falls, is forthcoming from Hogarth/Random House in September 2023. http://www.AngieKimBooks.com.
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This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Joan Biskupic — Nine Black Robes: Inside the Supreme Court's Drive to the Right and Its Historic Consequences - with Jake Tapper — at Conn Ave
Nine Black Robes displays the inner maneuverings among the Supreme Court justices that led to the seismic reversal of Roe v. Wade and a half century of women's abortion rights. Biskupic details how rights are stripped away or, alternatively as in the case of gun owners, how rights are expanded. Today's bench--with its conservative majority--is desperately ideological. The Court has been headed rightward and ensnared by its own intrigues for years, but the Trump appointments hastened the modern transformation. With unparalleled access to key players, Biskupic shows the tactics of each justice and reveals switched votes and internal pacts that typically never make the light of day, yet will have repercussions for generations to come. Nine Black Robes is the definitive narrative of the country's highest court and its profound impact on all Americans.
Joan Biskupic is CNN's Senior Supreme Court Analyst. Before joining CNN in 2017, she was an editor in charge for legal affairs at Reuters and was previously the Supreme Court correspondent for the Washington Post and for USA Today. Biskupic was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory journalism in 2015. In addition to her biography of John Roberts, The Chief: The Life and Turbulent Times of Chief Justice John Roberts, Biskupic is the author of books on Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, and Sonia Sotomayor. She also holds a law degree from Georgetown University.
Biskupic will be in conversation with Jake Tapper . Tapper is the author of The Devil May Dance and The Hellfire Club, which is being turned into a TV series by HBO Max, and The Outpost, which became a celebrated film released in 2020. An award-winning anchor for CNN.
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This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Rep. Katie Porter — I Swear: Politics Is Messier Than My Minivan — at Sixth & I
Click here for tickets to this in-person event (with the option for virtual attendance).
A book signing will follow the event.
Never having run for office before, Rep. Katie Porter defied expectations in 2018 when she was elected to Congress as a Democrat in historically conservative Orange County, California. Underestimated as a single mom and chided for her progressive values, she quickly went viral for videos of her using a whiteboard to take CEOs and corrupt government officials to task in Congressional hearings.
I Swear: Politics Is Messier Than My Minivan shares what it’s really like to serve in Congress and exposes the gaps between politicians’ press conferences and real people’s lives. With the same clarity she demonstrates in Congressional hearings, Rep. Porter makes the case for consumer protection, corporate accountability, and anti-corruption reforms, providing whiteboard lessons on where your campaign donations go, how to fight the corporations that cheat you, and how to conduct her trademark robust oversight.
Full of candid and inspiring stories—from how Rep. Porter lent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a pair of sneakers during the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021, to her kids’ lightly illegal campaign hijinks—this is a book by an exhausted, committed parent who just doesn’t have the time for nonsense in her house or in the House of Representatives.
Katie Porter represents Orange County, California, in Congress. Prior to being elected in 2018, she was a law professor and consumer finance expert. Katie lives with her three school-aged kids in Irvine, California.
with Politics and Prose
Abraham Riesman — Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America - with Jess Keefe — at Union Market
Even if you've never watched a minute of professional wrestling, you are living in Vince McMahon's world.
In his four decades as the defining figure of American pro wrestling, McMahon was the man behind Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, John Cena, Dave Bautista, Bret "The Hitman" Hart, and Hulk Hogan, to name just a few of the mega-stars who owe him their careers. For more than twenty-five years, he has also been a performer in his own show, acting as the diabolical "Mr. McMahon"--a figure who may have more in common with the real Vince than he would care to admit.
Just as importantly, McMahon is one of Donald Trump's closest friends--and Trump's experiences as a performer in McMahon's programming were, in many ways, a dress rehearsal for the 45th President's campaigns and presidency. McMahon and his wife, Linda, are major Republican donors. Linda was in Trump's cabinet. McMahon makes deals with the Saudi government worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And for generations of people who have watched wrestling, he has been a defining cultural force.
Accessible to anyone, regardless of wrestling knowledge, Ringmaster is an unauthorized, independent, investigative chronicle of Vince McMahon's origins and rise to supreme power. It is built on exclusive interviews with more than 150 people, from McMahon's childhood friends to those who accuse him of destroying their lives. Far more than just an athletics or entertainment biography, Ringmaster uses Vince's story as a new lens for understanding the contemporary American apocalypse.
Abraham Josephine Riesman is a journalist and essayist, as well as the author of the biographies Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America and True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee. She was a longtime staffer at New York magazine and its culture site, Vulture, and her work has also appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, VICE, The New Republic, and elsewhere. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with her spouse and their cats.
Riesman will be in conversation with Jess Keefe, a writer, editor, and author of Thirty-Thousand Steps: A Memoir of Sprinting Toward Life After Loss. Her writing has been published by Teen Vogue, HuffPost, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Runner's World, and more. She currently lives in Richmond, Virginia.
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This event is free with first come, first served seating.
P&P Live! & DCPL Andrea L. Rogers & Jeff Edwards - Man Made Monsters
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Politics and Prose is delighted to partner with the DC Public Library and the DC Public Library Foundation for a discussion of the horror novel Man Made Monsters with author Andrea L Rogers and illustrator Jeff Edwards. This event will be moderated by staff from DC Public Library.
The first 50 young people to register for the event and select the "Free Event Admission + Free Book" option at registration will receive complimentary copies of the books for their home library (one sign-up per family, please). Recipients of the complimentary copy will pick their book up in the Alma Thomas Teen Space at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, 901 G St. NW, Washington, DC, beginning Tuesday, April 18th. Please note that complimentary book copies must be picked up by Friday, April 28th. These books are generously donated by the District of Columbia Public Library Foundation. This program is presented in conjunction with D.C. Public Library’s Know Your Power contest, sponsored by Pepco. Teens are invited to submit an original work of writing, photography, illustration, or music that expresses their feelings on a social issue that matters to them. Click here for more information about Know Your Power.
About the Book:
Supernatural terrors are pitted against the real-life horrors faced by indigenous people during the colonization of America and beyond in this fresh take on classic monster stories from a debut author. The book is grounded in the author’s Cherokee heritage and draws on ancestral stories passed through her family. The tales link together like branches in a tree, featuring viewpoints from members of one Cherokee family beginning in 1839 when forced from their tribal lands in Georgia through the 20th century, even sneaking a look into the near future. Each story could easily stand on its own, but the familial connections between them posit deeper thinking about the horror of colonialism and cultural destruction. Alongside each story, Cherokee artist and language technologist Jeff Edwards delivers haunting illustrations that incorporate Cherokee syllabary.
About the Creators:
Andrea L Rogers is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. She grew up in Tulsa and graduated with an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Her stories have appeared in several literary journals as well as You Too? 25 Voices Share Their #METoo Stories, Ancestor Approved: Intertribal Stories for Kids, and in the anthology Allies. In 2020, she released the elementary fiction novel Mary and the Trail of Tears. Her novel Man Made Monsters recently won the 2023 Walter Dean Myers, Teen Category award. A picture book called When We Gather is forthcoming.
Jeff Edwards is a Cherokee graphic artist who has worked for the Cherokee Nation as a language technologist for over a decade to help advance the preservation and use of the Cherokee syllabary broadly. He received his BA in Design and Visual Communications at Northeastern State University and studied at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence Kansas. Edwards creates Cherokee themed artwork with syllabary graphics as design and cultural elements.
Chad L. Williams — The Wounded World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the First World War - with Michael Kazin — at Conn Ave
When W. E. B. Du Bois, believing in the possibility of full citizenship and democratic change, encouraged African Americans to "close ranks" and support the Allied cause in World War I, he made a decision that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Seeking both intellectual clarity and personal atonement, for more than two decades Du Bois attempted to write the definitive history of Black participation in World War I. His book, however, remained unfinished. In The Wounded World, Chad Williams offers the dramatic account of Du Bois's failed efforts to complete what would have been one of his most significant works. The surprising story of this unpublished book offers new insight into Du Bois's struggles to reckon with both the history and the troubling memory of the war, along with the broader meanings of race and democracy for Black people in the twentieth century.
Drawing on a broad range of sources, most notably Du Bois's unpublished manuscript and research materials, Williams tells a sweeping story of hope, betrayal, disillusionment, and transformation, setting into motion a fresh understanding of the life and mind of arguably the most significant scholar-activist in African American history. In uncovering what happened to Du Bois's largely forgotten book, Williams offers a captivating reminder of the importance of World War I, why it mattered to Du Bois, and why it continues to matter today.
Chad L. Williams is the Samuel J. and Augusta Spector Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Brandeis University. He is the author of the award-winning book Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era and the coeditor of Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence. His writings and op-eds have appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Time, and The Conversation. He lives in Needham, Massachusetts.
Williams will be in conversation with Michael Kazin. Kazin is a professor of history at Georgetown University and editor emeritus of Dissent magazine. He is the author of seven books and the editor of three. His latest book, What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party, was published in March 2022 (paperback, March 2023). It was an Editor’s Choice of the New York Times and was named by Kirkus as one of the ten best books on U.S. history published in 2022. Kazin is a former on-line columnist for The New Republic and has written articles and reviews for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, The New York Review of Books and many other periodicals and websites. He has held fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Center, The Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Smithsonian Institution, and the Fulbright Program and has lectured widely in the United States, Europe, Russia, and Japan. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Gretchen Rubin — Life in Five Senses: How Exploring the Senses Got Me Out of My Head and Into the World - with Emily Esfahani Smith — at Sidwell Friends School Robert L. Smith Meeting Room
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Life in Five Senses is an absorbing, layered story of discovery filled with thoughtful insights and hands-on suggestions about how to heighten our senses and use our powers of perception to live fuller, richer lives—and, ultimately, how to move through the world with more vitality and love.
Gretchen Rubin is one of today’s most influential observers of happiness and human nature. She’s the author of many books, including the blockbuster New York Times bestsellers Outer Order, Inner Calm; The Four Tendencies; Better Than Before; and The Happiness Project. Her books have sold more than 3.5 million copies worldwide, in more than thirty languages. She hosts the top-ranking, award-winning podcast “Happier with Gretchen Rubin,” where she explores practical solutions for living a happier life. Raised in Kansas City, she lives in New York City with her husband and two daughters.
Rubin will be conversation with Emily Esfahani Smith. Smith is the author of The Power of Meaning, an international bestseller that has been translated into 16 different languages. The former managing editor of The New Criterion, Smith’s articles and essays about psychology and culture have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and other publications. In 2019, she was a Poynter Journalism Fellow at Yale University. Smith is also a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at the Catholic University of America, where she is training as a therapist.
All tickets include a signed book.
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Barbara Pendleton Jones — Tula Pendleton: The Life and Work of a Forgotten Southern Writer - with Susan Shreve — at Conn Ave
Tula Pendleton was the belle of her small Kentucky hometown when she married Holmes Cummins Jr., a rising young insurance executive, in 1894. When the expected children never came, Tula turned her hand to writing short fiction, publishing stories in popular American magazines. Her range as an author was impressive, from romances and medical dramas to truly haunting tales of the uncanny. She also wrote charming stories of small-town life that addressed the pleasures, comforts, and stings of life in a rural community.
Tula’s stories were well received, but as her writing career blossomed, the couple struggled with family, health, and financial troubles. In 1924, they carried out a suicide pact, an event covered by more than 120 American newspapers at the time. Soon after, though, both Tula and her work were forgotten.
This volume, researched and written by Tula’s great-niece, relates with empathy and insight the remarkable story of Tula’s life. It also collects, for the first time, all of her extant stories, giving new generations the chance to discover the work of this extraordinary Southern writer.
Barbara Pendleton Jones, great-niece of Tula Pendleton Cummins, grew up hearing only the barest account of Tula’s career as a writer and her tragic death. When she set out to learn more about her great-aunt, she had only two of Tula’s letters and fragments of her family history. By piecing together Tula’s genealogy, finding her published stories, locating letters and newspaper articles in archives, and retracing Tula’s steps across much of the South, Jones—a retired psychologist and psychoanalyst—has crafted a moving and illuminating portrait of her extraordinary relative.
Jones will be in conversation with Susan Shreve. Shreve is the author of fifteen novels, most recently You Are the Love of My Life, a memoir Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood and twenty-nine books for children. She has edited or co-edited five anthologies and her essays have appeared in several collections as well as The New York Times, The Washington Post and several magazines. She was co-founder and has been a Professor in the Master of Fine Arts Program at George Mason University for more than forty years. In 1985, she co-founded the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and served for thirty years most recently as Chairman.
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This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Katie Holten — The Language of Trees: A Rewilding of Literature and Landscape — at Conn Ave
Inspired by forests, trees, leaves, roots, and seeds, The Language of Trees: A Rewilding of Literature and Landscape invites readers to discover an unexpected and imaginative language to better read and write the natural world around us and reclaim our relationship with it. In this gorgeously illustrated and deeply thoughtful collection, Katie Holten gifts readers her tree alphabet and uses it to masterfully translate and illuminate beloved writing in praise of the natural world. With an introduction from Ross Gay, and featuring writings from over fifty contributors, including Ursula K. Le Guin, Ada Limón, Robert Macfarlane, Zadie Smith, Radiohead, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, James Gleick, Elizabeth Kolbert, Plato, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, Holten illustrates each selection with an abiding love and reverence for the magic of trees. She guides readers on a journey from "primeval atoms" and cave paintings to the death of a 3,500 year-old cypress tree, from Tree Clocks in Mongolia and forest fragments in the Amazon to the language of fossil poetry, unearthing a new way to see the natural beauty all around us and an urgent reminder of what could happen if we allow it to slip away. The Language of Trees considers our relationship with literature and landscape, resulting in an astonishing fusion of storytelling and art and a deeply beautiful celebration of trees through the ages.
Katie Holten is an artist and activist. In 2003, she represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale. She has had solo exhibitions at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Nevada Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane. Her drawings investigate the tangled relationships between humans and the natural world. She has created Tree Alphabets, a Stone Alphabet, and a Wildflower Alphabet to share the joy she finds in her love of the more-than-human world. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Artforum, and frieze. She is a visiting lecturer at the New School of the Anthropocene. If she could be a tree, she would be an Oak.
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This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Katherine Heiny — Games and Rituals: Stories - with Jennifer Close — at Conn Ave
The games and rituals performed by Katherine Heiny's characters range from mischievous to tender: In "Bridesmaid, Revisited," Marlee, suffering from a laundry and life crisis, wears a massive bridesmaid's dress to work. In "Twist and Shout," Erica's elderly father mistakes his four-thousand-dollar hearing aid for a cashew and eats it. In "Turn Back, Turn Back," a bedtime story coupled with a receipt for a Starbucks babyccino reveal a struggling actor's deception. And in "561," Charlene pays the true price of infidelity and is forced to help her husband's ex-wife move out of the family home. ("It's like you're North Korea and South Korea . . . But would North Korea help South Korea move?") From one of our most celebrated writers, our bard of waking up in the wrong bed, wearing the wrong shoes, late for the wrong job, but loved by the right people, Heiny has delivered a work of glorious humor and immense kindness.
Katherine Heiny is the author of Early Morning Riser, Standard Deviation, and Single, Carefree, Mellow, and her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and many other magazines. She has lived in London, The Hague, and Boyne City, Michigan, and now lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with her husband and children.
Heiny will be in conversation with Jennifer Close. Close is the best-selling author of Girls in White Dresses, The Smart One, and The Hopefuls. Born and raised on the North Shore of Chicago, she is a graduate of Boston College and received her M.F.A. in Fiction Writing from the New School. She now lives in Washington, DC, and teaches creative writing at Catapult.
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This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Wendy Dean — If I Betray These Words: Moral Injury in Medicine and Why It's So Hard for Clinicians to Put Patients First - with Candice Chen — at Conn Ave
Offering examples of how to make medicine better for the healers and those they serve, If I Betray These Words profiles clinicians across the country who are tough, resourceful, and resilient, but feel trapped between the patient-first values of their Hippocratic oath and the business imperatives of a broken healthcare system. Doctors face real risks when they stand up for their patients and their oath; they may lose their license, their livelihood, and for some, even their lives. There's a growing sense, referred to as moral injury, that doctors have their hands tied - they know what patients need but can't get it for them because of constraints imposed by healthcare systems run like big businesses. Workforce distress in healthcare--moral injury--was a crisis long before the COVID-19 pandemic, but COVID highlighted the vulnerabilities in our healthcare systems and made it impossible to ignore the distress, with 1 in 5 American healthcare workers leaving the profession since 2020, and up to 47% of U.S. healthcare workers now planning to leave their positions by 2025. If I Betray These Words confronts the threat and broken promises of moral injury - what it is; where it comes from; how it manifests; and who's fighting back against it. We need better healthcare--for patients and for the workforce. It's time to act.
Wendy Dean, MD is the President and co-founder of Moral Injury of Healthcare, a nonprofit organization focused on alleviating workforce distress. A seminal article that she co-authored with Simon Talbot, MD for STATNews in July of 2018 began the conversation about moral injury in healthcare. Dr. Dean has practiced as a psychiatrist and an emergency room physician, and is an expert in hand and face transplants, and the ethics of medical innovations.
Dr. Dean will be joined in conversation with, Dr. Candice Chen, an Associate Professor of Health Policy & Management at the Fitzhugh Mullan Institute for Health Workforce Equity in the George Washington University. Her work focuses on the intersection of health workforce and health equity. She is also a primary care pediatrician who practices in Southeast Washington, D.C.
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This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Susan Crawford — Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm — at Conn Ave
At least thirteen million Americans will have to move away from American coasts in the coming decades, as rising sea levels and increasingly severe storms put lives at risk and cause billions of dollars in damages. In Charleston, South Carolina, denial, boosterism, widespread development, and public complacency about racial issues compound; the city, like our country, has no plan to protect its most vulnerable. In these pages, Susan Crawford tells the story of a city that has played a central role in America's painful racial history for centuries and now, as the waters rise, stands at the intersection of climate and race.
Unbeknownst to the seven million mostly white tourists who visit the charming streets of the lower peninsula each year, the Holy City is in a deeply precarious position. Weaving science, narrative history, and the family stories of Black Charlestonians, Charleston chronicles the tumultuous recent past in the life of the city--from protests to hurricanes--while revealing the escalating risk in its future. A bellwether for other towns and cities, Charleston is emblematic of vast portions of the American coast, with a future of inundation juxtaposed against little planning to ensure a thriving future for all residents.
In Charleston, we meet Rev. Joseph Darby, a well-regarded Black minister with a powerful voice across the city and region who has an acute sense of the city's shortcomings when it comes to matters of race and water. We also hear from Michelle Mapp, one of the city's most promising Black leaders, and Quinetha Frasier, a charismatic young Black entrepreneur with Gullah-Geechee roots who fears her people's displacement. And there is Jacob Lindsey, a young white city planner charged with running the city's ten-year "comprehensive plan" efforts who ends up working for a private developer. These and others give voice to the extraordinary risks the city is facing.
The city of Charleston, with its explosive gentrification over the last thirty years, crystallizes a human tendency to value development above all else. At the same time, Charleston stands for our need to change our ways--and the need to build higher, drier, more densely-connected places where all citizens can live safely.
Illuminating and vividly rendered, Charleston is a clarion call and filled with characters who will stay in the reader's mind long after the final page.
Susan Crawford is the John A. Reilly Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She previously was Obama's special assistant to the president for science, technology, and innovation policy and co-led the FCC transition team between his and the Bush administrations. Earlier in her career, Crawford was a partner at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. As an academic, she teaches courses about climate adaptation and public leadership. Crawford is the author of several books, including Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age and Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution and Why America Might Miss It.
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This event is free with first come, first served seating.
SOLD OUT - Mo Willems - Be the Bus & Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus 20th Anniversary Ed. - At Sidwell Friends
A family event in celebration of 20 years of The Pigeon with Mo Willems!
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UPDATE: Please note that this event is sold out.
Let me be the first to say that everything has already been said.
Surprises happen when you least expect them.
If I could change just ONE thing about myself, I'd be perfect.
Do you love The Pigeon? Come meet his creator, Mo Willems, as he shares his new book, Be the Bus: The Lost & Profound Wisdom of the Pigeon and Don’t Let The Pigeon Drive the Bus! 20th Anniversary Edition.
Be the Bus is a novelty book for adult Pigeon enthusiasts that shares important tips, thoughts, opinions, quotes, complaints, and basic philosophical misunderstandings in this profound collection of Pigeon-isms.
Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! 20th Anniversary Edition includes the original beloved story along with an all-new board game.
Books will be available pre-signed by Willems, and the Pigeon will be coming to meet his fans. A copy of Be the Bus is included in the ticket price, and Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! 20th Anniversary Edition will be available for pre-signing as well.
Mo Willems is an author, illustrator, animator, playwright, and the inaugural Kennedy Center Education Artist-in-Residence. He is best known for his bestselling picture books, which have been awarded three Caldecott Honors. Willems has written or co-written four musicals based on his books and he began his career as a writer and animator on PBS’ Sesame Street, where he won six Emmy Awards for writing.
All tickets include a copy of Be the Bus. If you'd like to purchase a copy of Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus 20th Anniversary Edition, and/or an additional copy of Be the Bus, select the add-on option when you are purchasing your ticket.
All books will be pre-signed, the author will not be signing books after the event
Attendees are encouraged to follow COVID guidance provided by the school while on campus.
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Rebecca Grant — Birth: Three Mothers, Nine Months, and Pregnancy in America - with Molly Ball — at Conn Ave
In Birth, journalist Rebecca Grant provides us with a never-before-seen look at the changing landscape of pregnancy and childbirth in America--and the rise of midwifery--told through the eyes of three women who all pass through the doors of the same birth center in Portland, Oregon.
There's Alison, a teacher whose long path to a healthy pregnancy has led her to question a traditional hospital birth; T'Nika, herself born with the help of a midwife and now a nurse hoping to work in Labor & Delivery and improve equality in healthcare; and Jillian, an office manager and aspiring midwife who works at Andaluz Birth Center, excited for a new beginning, but anxious about how bringing a new life into the world might mean the deferral of her own dreams.
In remarkable detail and with great compassion, Grant recounts the ups downs, fears, joys, and everyday moments of each woman's pregnancy and postpartum journey, offering a rare look into their inner lives, perspectives, and choices in real time--and addresses larger issues facing the entire nation, from discrimination in medicine and treatment (both gender and race-based) to fertility, family planning, complicated feelings about motherhood and career, and the stigmas of miscarriage and postpartum blues. The result is an inspiring and illuminating look at one of life's most profound rites of passage.
Rebecca Grant is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Oregon, who covers reproductive rights, health, and justice. Her work has appeared in NPR, The Atlantic, VICE, The Nation, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, HuffPost, and The Guardian, among other publications. She has received grants and fellowships from the International Women’s Media Foundation, the International Reporting Project, and The Investigative Fund, reporting stories around the US and the world. Rebecca studied English and art history at Cornell University and served in the Peace Corps in Thailand. Before full-time freelancing, she worked at Washingtonian Magazine and wrote about startups in San Francisco.
Grant will be in converaation with Molly Ball. Ball is Time magazine’s national political correspondent and a frequent television and radio commentator. She is the author of Pelosi, a bestselling biography of the first woman Speaker of the House. Prior to joining Time, Ball covered U.S. politics for The Atlantic, Politico and the Las Vegas Review-Journal. She has received numerous awards for her political coverage, including the Dirksen Award for Distinguished Reporting of Congress, the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency and the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting. A graduate of Yale University, Ball won $100,000 on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in 2007. She grew up in Idaho and Colorado and lives in the Washington, DC, area with her husband and three children.
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This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Taj McCoy — Zora Books Her Happy Ever After - with Andie J. Christopher — at Conn Ave
Zora has committed every inch of her life to establishing her thriving DC bookstore, making it into a pillar of the community, and she just hasn't had time for romance. But when a mystery author she's been crushing on for years agrees to have an event at her store, she starts to rethink her priorities. Lawrence is every bit as charming as she imagined, even if his understanding of his own books seems just a bit shallow. When he asks her out after his reading, she's almost elated enough to forget about the grumpy guy who sat next to her making snide comments all evening. Apparently the grouch is Lawrence's best friend, Reid, but she can't imagine what kind of friendship that must be. They couldn't be more different. But as she starts seeing Lawrence, and spending more and more time with Reid, Zora finds first impressions can be deceiving. Reid is smart and thoughtful--he's also interested. After years of avoiding dating, she suddenly has two handsome men competing for her affection. But even as she struggles to choose between them, she can't shake the feeling that they're both hiding something--a mystery she's determined to solve before she can find her HEA.
Law grad Taj McCoy is committed to championing plus-sized Black love stories and characters with a strong sense of sisterhood and familial bonds. Born in Oakland, Taj started writing as a child and celebrated her first publications in grade school. When she’s not writing, Taj boosts other marginalized writers, practices yoga, co-hosts the Fat Like Me and Better Than Brunch podcasts, shares recipes, and cooks supper club meals for friends.
McCoy will be in conversation with USA Today Bestselling author Andie J. Christopher. Christopher writes sharp, witty, sexy contemporary romance about complex people finding happily ever after. Her work has been featured in NPR, Cosmopolitan, The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, and The New York Post. Prickly heroines are her hallmark, and she is the originator of the Stern Brunch Daddy. Andie lives in the Nation’s Capital with a French bulldog, a stockpile of Campari, and way too many books.
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This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Ellen Oh - You Are Here: Connecting Flights - at Conn Ave
Airports are where people and lives briefly touch, interact and then move on. In these twelve interwoven short stories by different authors set in a Chicago airport, Asian–American children and teens interact with each other while awaiting flights. Unfortunately, sometimes when they encounter other passengers these children are met with racism, leading to the overarching question: are you where you belong? This collection of powerful, yet funny stories is a great start to a conversation about both listening and speaking up in order to find one’s place in society.
Ellen Oh is an award-winning author of the Prophecy trilogy, a series of fantasy, young adult novels based on Korean folklore and middle grade novels, most recently Finding Junie Kim. She is a founding member of We Need Diverse Books, a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing diversity in children's literature. Ellen lives in Rockville, Maryland with her husband, three human children, and two dog children.
Ages 9-12
This event is free to attend and open to the public, however, reservations are required for school groups interested in attending. Seating is available on a first come, first served basis.
Kyla Sommers — When the Smoke Cleared: The 1968 Rebellions and the Unfinished Battle for Civil Rights in the Nation's Capital — at Conn Ave
In April 1968, following the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., a wave of uprisings swept across America. None was more visible--or resulted in more property damage, arrests, or federal troop involvement--than in Washington, DC, where thousands took to the streets in protest against racial inequality, looting and burning businesses in the process. The nation's capital was shaken to its foundations.
When the Smoke Cleared tells the story of the Washingtonians who seized the moment to rebuild a more just society, one that would protect and foster Black political and economic power. A riveting account of activism, urban reimagination, and political transformation, Kyla Sommers's revealing and deeply researched narrative is ultimately a tale of blowback, as the Nixon administration and its allies in Congress thwarted the ambitions of DC's reformers, opposing civil rights reforms and self-governance. And nationwide, conservative politicians used the specter of crime in the capital to roll back the civil rights movement and create the modern carceral state.
A vital chapter in the struggle for racial equality, When the Smoke Cleared is an account of open wounds, paths not taken, and their unforeseen consequences--revealed here in all of their contemporary significance.
Kyla Sommers earned her PhD in history from the George Washington University. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Washington History journal, and the book Demand the Impossible: Essays in History as Activism. Sommers is the digital engagement editor at American Oversight and was previously the editor-in-chief of the History News Network. The author of When the Smoke Cleared (The New Press), she lives in Washington, DC.
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This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Panel Discussion — On Minimalism: Documenting a Musical Movement - with William Robin, Kerry O'Brien, Chris Richards and a Musical Performance by Jeff Barsky — at Union Market
When composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich began creating hypnotically repetitive music in the 1960s, it upended the world of American composition. But minimalism was more than a classical phenomenon--minimalism changed everything. Its static harmonies and groovy pulses swept through the broader avant-garde landscape, informing the work of Yoko Ono and Brian Eno, John and Alice Coltrane, Pauline Oliveros and Julius Eastman, and many others.
On Minimalism moves from the style's beginnings in psychedelic counterculture through its present-day influences on ambient jazz, doom metal, and electronic music. The editors look beyond the major figures to highlight crucial and diverse voices--especially women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ musicians--that have shaped the genre. Featuring more than a hundred rare historical sources, On Minimalism curates this history anew, documenting one of the most important musical movements of our time.
William Robin is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Maryland’s School of Music, author of Industry: Bang on a Can and Music in the Marketplace, and a contributor to the New York Times. (https://williamrobin.com/)
Chris Richards has been The Washington Post's pop music critic since 2009. Before joining The Post, he freelanced for various music publications.
Insect Factory is the project of Silver Spring, MD guitar player (and elementary school teacher) Jeff Barsky. Barsky sculpts guitar meditations that emphasize hypnotic texture and mood. He has released numerous LPs, CDs, and cassettes, both solo and collaboratively over the past 15 years. Barsky has performed all over the U.S., in Canada, throughout Europe, and Japan.He has performed at the Suoni Per Il Popolo festival in Montreal, Terrastock7 in Louisville, KY, and DC’s Seventh Stanine, Sonic Circuits, Queering Sound, and Fringe Festivals.
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This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Holocaust Remembrance Day Panel with Martha Anne Toll, Jai Chakrabarti, Ari Joskowicz, and Karen Baum Gordon — at Conn Ave
Martha Anne Toll, Jai Chakrabarti, Ari Joskowicz, and Karen Baum Gordon will be in conversation about their latest titles Three Muses, A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness, Rain of Ash, and The Last Letter: A Father's Struggle, a Daughter's Quest, and the Long Shadow of the Holocaust.
Three Muses is a love story that enthralls: a tale of Holocaust survival venturing through memory, trauma, and identity, while raising the curtain on the unforgiving discipline of ballet. The stories in A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness capture men and women struggling with transformation and familial bonds; they traverse the intersections of countries and cultures to illuminate what it means to love in uncertain times; and they showcase the skill of a storyteller who dazzles with the breadth of his vision. Rain of Ash is the untold story of how Roma turned to Jewish institutions, funding sources, and professional networks as they sought to gain recognition and compensation for their wartime suffering. In The Last Letter: A Father's Struggle, a Daughter's Quest, and the Long Shadow of the Holocaust, Gordon explores not only her father's life story, but also the stories and events that shaped the lives of her grandparents--two Holocaust victims that Rudy tried in vain to save in the late 1930s and early years of World War II.
Martha Anne Toll writes fiction, essays, and book reviews, and reads anything that’s not nailed down. Her debut novel, Three Muses, won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction. Martha brings a long career in social justice to her work covering BIPOC and women writers. She is a book reviewer and author interviewer at NPR Books, the Washington Post, The Millions, and elsewhere; and publishes short fiction and essays in a wide variety of outlets.
Jai Chakrabarti is the author of the novel A Play for the End of the World (Knopf), which won the National Jewish Book Award, was the Association of Jewish Libraries Honor Book, was short-listed for the Tagore Prize, and was long-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He is also the author of the story collection A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness (Feb-2023). His short fiction has appeared in One Story, Electric Literature, A Public Space, Conjunctions, and elsewhere and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and awarded a Pushcart Prize.
Ari Joskowicz is a historian with a special interest in the complicated relations between different minority groups. An Associate Professor of Jewish Studies, European Studies, and History at Vanderbilt University, he is the author of The Modernity of Others: Jewish Anti-Catholicism in Germany and France and editor of Secularism in Question: Jews and Judaism in Modern Times. He also serves as the director of Vanderbilt’s Max Kade Center for European and German Studies.
A graduate of Harvard College and Columbia Business School, Karen Baum Gordon co-founded Strategic Horizons, Inc., an executive coaching and management consulting firm. Karen is a Dallas native and now lives with her husband and black lab in Brooklyn, New York, and South Hero, Vermont. She is an active member of Brooklyn Heights Synagogue and recently served as president of the congregation.
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This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Poetry Night with Kyle Dargan and Rasheed Copeland — Panzer Herz: A Live Dissection — at Conn Ave
Kyle Dargan is the author of Anagnorisis (TriQuarterly, 2018), which was awarded the 2019 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and longlisted for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He has received the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and he was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Dargan is currently an associate professor of literature and assistant director of creative writing at American University. He also works as the books editor for Janelle Monáe’s creative company, Wondaland.
Rasheed Copeland is the author of The Book of Silence: Manhood As a Pseudoscience (Sergeant Press, 2015). A multiple recipient of the DC Commission of the Arts and Humanities Fellowship Award, he is a native of Washington, D.C.
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Tamika Y. Nunley — The Demands of Justice: Enslaved Women, Capital Crime, and Clemency in Early Virginia - in conversation with Marcia Chatelain — at Conn Ave
Award-winning historian Tamika Y. Nunley has unearthed the stories of enslaved Black women charged by their owners with poisoning, theft, murder, infanticide, and arson. While free Black and white people accused of capital crimes received a hearing, trial, and, if convicted, an opportunity to appeal, none of these options were available to enslaved people. Conviction was final, and only the state or owners could spare their accused chattel of punishment by death. For enslaved women in Virginia, clemency was not uncommon, but Nunley shows why this act ultimately benefitted owners and punished the accused with sale outside of the state as the best possible outcome.
Demonstrating how crimes, convictions, and clemency functioned within a slave society that upheld the property interests of white Virginians, Nunley reveals the frequency with which owners preferred to keep the accused in bondage, which allowed them, behind the veil of paternalism, to continue to benefit from Black women's labor. This so-called clemency also sought to rob Black women of the power they exercised when they committed capital crimes. The testimonies that Nunley has collected and analyzed offer compelling glimpses of the self-identities forged by Black women as they attempted to resist enslavement and the limits of justice available to them in the antebellum courtroom.
Tamika Y. Nunley is associate professor of history at Cornell University.
Nunley will be joined in conversation with, Marcia Chatelain, an American academic who serves as a professor of history and African American studies at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. In 2021, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History for her book Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, which also won a James Beard Award.
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Rachel Beanland — The House Is on Fire - with Laura Hankin — at Conn Ave
Richmond, Virginia 1811. It's the height of the winter social season, the General Assembly is in session, and many of Virginia's gentleman planters, along with their wives and children, have made the long and arduous journey to the capital in hopes of whiling away the darkest days of the year. At the city's only theater, the Charleston-based Placide & Green Company puts on two plays a night to meet the demand of a populace that's done looking for enlightenment at the front of a church. On the night after Christmas, the theater is packed with more than six hundred holiday revelers. In the third-floor boxes, sits newly-widowed Sally Henry Campbell, who is glad for any opportunity to relive the happy times she shared with her husband. One floor away, in the colored gallery, Cecily Patterson doesn't give a whit about the play but is grateful for a four-hour reprieve from a life that has recently gone from bad to worse. Backstage, young stagehand Jack Gibson hopes that, if he can impress the theater's managers, he'll be offered a permanent job with the company. And on the other side of town, blacksmith Gilbert Hunt dreams of one day being able to bring his wife to the theater, but he'll have to buy her freedom first. When the theater goes up in flames in the middle of the performance, Sally, Cecily, Jack, and Gilbert make a series of split-second decisions that will not only affect their own lives but those of countless others. And in the days following the fire, as news of the disaster spreads across the United States, the paths of these four people will become forever intertwined. Based on the true story of Richmond's theater fire, The House Is on Fire offers proof that sometimes, in the midst of great tragedy, we are offered our most precious--and fleeting--chances at redemption.
Rachel Beanland is the author of the novel Florence Adler Swims Forever. She is a graduate of the University of South Carolina and earned her MFA in creative writing from Virginia Commonwealth University. She lives with her husband and three children in Richmond, Virginia.
Beanland will be in conversation with Laura Hankin. Hankin is an author, screenwriter, and performer who writes novels that you can read on a beach but also for a book club. Her books include Happy & You Know It, a Book of the Month and Library Reads selection, A Special Place for Women, as seen on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and the upcoming The Daydreams, available for preorder now. She has some TV/film projects in development, and her musical comedy has been featured in outlets like The Washington Post and The New York Times. Hankin is based in Washington, DC, where she once fell off a treadmill twice in one day.
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Johannes Lichtman — Calling Ukraine - with Stephen Fishbach — at Conn Ave
Shortly after his thirtieth birthday, John Turner receives a call from an old college friend who makes him an odd job offer: move to Ukraine to teach customer service agents at a startup how to sound American. John's never been to Ukraine, doesn't speak Ukrainian, and is supposed to be a journalist, not a consultant. But having just gone through a break-up and the death of his father, it might just be the new start he's been looking for. In Ukraine, John understands very little--the language and social customs are impenetrable to him. At work, his employees are fluent in English but have difficulty grasping the concept of "small talk." And although he told himself not to get romantically involved while abroad, he can't help but be increasingly drawn to one of his colleagues. Most distressing, however, is the fact that John can hear, through their shared wall, his neighbor beating his wife. Desperate to help, John decides to offer the neighbor 100,000 hryvnias to stop. It's a plan born out the best intentions, but one that has disastrous repercussions that no amount of money or altruism can resolve. Like Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station and Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You, Calling Ukraine reimagines the American-abroad novel. Moving effortlessly between the comic and the tragic, Johannes Lichtman deploys his signature wry humor and startling moral acuity to illuminate the inevitable complexities of doing right by others.
Johannes Lichtman was born in Stockholm and raised in California. He holds an MFA in fiction from UNC Wilmington and an MA in literature, culture, and media from Lund University. His work has appeared in The Sun, Tin House, Los Angeles Review of Books, Oxford American, and elsewhere. He lives in Portland. His debut novel, Such Good Work, was selected for the 2019 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35.
Lichtman will be in conversation with Stephen Fishbach. Fishbach is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer and former MTV executive. At MTV, he worked on the Peabody and Emmy award-winning Fight For Your Rights campaigns, which educated young people about discrimination, marriage equality, and school violence. He is cohost of the Know It Alls, which every so often is one of iTunes’ top-ranked TV podcasts, and host of Paraphrase, in which he interviews authors about their craft choices. In 2009 and 2015, he was on the TV show Survivor.
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Stevan M. Weine — Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness — at Conn Ave
Allen Ginsberg's 1956 poem "Howl" opens with one of the most resonant phrases in modern poetry: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness." Thirty years later, Ginsberg entrusted a Columbia University medical student with materials not shared with anyone else, including psychiatric records that documented how he and his mother, Naomi Ginsberg, struggled with mental illness.
In Best Minds, psychiatrist, researcher, and scholar Stevan M. Weine, M.D., who was that medical student, examines how Allen Ginsberg took his visions and psychiatric hospitalization, his mother's devastating illness, confinement, and lobotomy, and the social upheavals of the postwar world and imaginatively transformed them.
With a forty-year career studying and addressing trauma, Weine provides a groundbreaking exploration of the poet and his creative process especially in relation to madness. Weine also provides new understandings of the paternalism, treatment failures, ethical lapses, and limitations of American psychiatry in the 1940s and 1950s. In light of these new discoveries, the challenges Ginsberg faced appear starker and his achieve-ments, both as a poet and an advocate, even more remarkable.
Dr.Stevan M. Weine is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, where he is also Director of Global Medicine and Director of the Center for Global Health. He is the author of two books: When History is a Nightmare: Lives and Memories of Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Testimony and Catastrophe: Narrating the Traumas of Political Violence.
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Tova Reich — The House of Love and Prayer: and Other Stories — at Conn Ave
The nine stories collected in this volume are all populated by seekers—of holiness, illumination, liberation, meaning, love. Their journeys unfold in the U.S., Israel, Poland, China, often in the very heart of the Jewish world, and are rendered with an insider’s authority. The narrative voice bringing all this to life has been described as fearlessly satiric and subversive, with a moral but not moralizing edge, equally alive to the sacred and the profane, comically absurd to the point of tragedy. From the opening story, “The Lost Girl” (winner of a National Magazine Award in Fiction) to “Dead Zone” in the closing pages of this collection, we are confronted with souls unable to rest, unable to find release, searching for their place in this life, and beyond. Between these two stories, we encounter a true believer seeking personal redemption in China (“Forbidden City”), an aged woman longing at the end of her life to find a way back to her mother (“The Plot”), and a man of faith struggling to rise above his own body (“Genderfluid”). Three of the stories, “The Page Turner,” “The Third Generation,” and “Dedicated to the Dead,” are animated by the long-term fallout from the Holocaust—generational trauma, abuse of memory, competitive victimization, and more. In the midst of all this is the story The House of Love and Prayer, which, in its way, encompasses the entire spectrum. The novelist Howard Norman has said, “Few contemporary writers are truly original. Tova Reich is one of them.” Read this book and discover her satiric genius.
Tova Reich is the author of the novels Mara and Master of the Return, which won the Edgar Lewis Wallant Award for fiction. Her stories and reviews have appeared in, among other publications, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and The New York Times. She lives on the fringe of Washington, D.C., with her husband and children.
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Melissa Scholes Young — Grace in Love (Grace & Gravity Vol. X) — at Conn Ave
Join us for the launch of volume X, Grace in Love, in the Grace & Gravity anthology series of DC Women Writers.
Grace in Love is the 10th volume of the Grace and Gravity anthology series, a literary journal devoted to women writers in the DC region. Grace in Love features fiction and nonfiction stories about heartbreak, romance, desire, self-love, family bonds, and more. In the past twenty years, the project has published nine volumes of more than 300 local women writers. The Grace and Gravity project was founded by Richard Peabody and is now edited by Melissa Scholes Young.
Melissa Scholes Young is the author of the novels Flood and The Hive. She is a Professor in the Literature Department of American University where she coordinates the undergraduate creative writing program. Melissa teaches every summer at the Tennants Cove Writers Workshop in New Brunswick, Canada.
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Robin Lloyd — Hidden Cargo — at Conn Ave
Five months after the end of the Civil War, Acting Navy Lieutenant Everett Townsend is awaiting discharge in Key West. The end of the war has left him uncertain about his future and full of regret about the end of his relationship with Emma, the Cuban American daughter of a Havana boarding house owner. His Spanish grandmother- a slave owner who runs a prosperous sugar plantation in the Cuban countryside- is dreaming that Everett will return and take over the family business, a prospect that sickens him. Returning from a routine supply mission from Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas, he and his men are caught in a hurricane and witness a shipwreck in the Marquesas Keys. When they investigate, they discover a locked cargo hold with the dead bodies of Black freedmen. When Townsend reports this unsettling incident to his distracted Naval commander in Key West, he's encouraged to drop the matter. But he can't shake his suspicions that the poor souls from the cargo hold were destined for re-enslavement in the sugar fields of Spanish Cuba. The murder of an American sailor in a Cuban port provides Townsend with a reason to return to Cuba and continue his investigation even as it reunites him with Emma who has joined the secretive Cuban resistance to Spanish colonial rule. A rescue of a Navy veteran leads to more clues and helps convince Townsend to become a government informant operating in the interior of Cuba. He goes to live with his Spanish grandmother at her sugar plantation in the Cuban countryside. There Townsend finds himself facing an impossible choice between the Cuban-American woman he loves and his tradition-bound Spanish grandmother. As he grapples with this clash of personalities, Townsend uncovers the details of a conspiracy which forces him to come face to face with his own family's close ties to slavery.
Robin Lloyd is the author of Harbor of Spies and Rough Passage to London, two seafaring suspense novels set in the nineteenth century. Lloyd was a foreign correspondent for NBC News for many years, where he reported from Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and Africa. He also covered the White House during the Reagan and Bush administrations. Lloyd has created and produced news programs with foreign networks as well as documentaries and segments for domestic stations, including Maryland Public Television. Among his prestigious awards are four Emmys from the National Capital Chesapeake Bay region and an Overseas Press Award. He and his wife divide their time between Chevy Chase, Maryland and Maine.
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P&P Live! Gina Apostol — La Tercera - with Idra Novey
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Rosario, a Filipina novelist in New York City, has just learned of her mother's death in the Philippines. Instead of rushing home, she puts off her return by embarking on a remote investigation into her family's history and her mother's supposed inheritance, a place called La Tercera, which may or may not exist. Rosario catalogs generations of Delgado family bequests and detritus: maps of uncertain purpose, rusted chicken coops, a secret journal, the words to songs sung at the family home during visits from Imelda Marcos.
Each life Rosario explores opens onto an array of other lives and raises a multitude of new questions. But as the search for La Tercera becomes increasingly labyrinthine, Rosario's mother and the entire Delgado family emerge in all their dizzying complexity: traitors and heroes, reactionaries and revolutionaries. Meanwhile, another narrative takes shape--of the country's erased history of exploitation and slaughter at the hands of American occupying forces.
La Tercera is Gina Apostol's most ambitious, personal, and encompassing novel: a story about what seems impossible--capturing the truth of the past--and the terrible cost to a family, or a country, that fails to try.
Gina Apostol is the author of the novels Insurrecto, Gun Dealers’ Daughter, Bibliolepsy, and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata. She is the winner of two Philippine National Book Awards, the PEN/Open Award, and the Rome Prize. She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, Leyte, in the Philippines.
Apostol will be in conversation with Idra Novey. Novey is a writer and translator. Her newest novel Take What You Need is a most anticipated book of 2023 with Vulture, Elle, Oprah Daily, Today.com and LitHub . She is also the author of Those Who Knew, a finalist for the 2019 Clark Fiction Prize, an Indie Next Pick, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her first novel Ways to Disappear, was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into a dozen languages and she’s written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Los Angeles Times. Her works as a translator include Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H. and a co-translation with Ahmad Nadalizadeh of Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian, Lean Against This Late Hour, a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Prize in 2021. In 2022, she received a Pushcart Prize for her story "The Glacier. "She teaches fiction at Princeton University.
Philip Zelikow — Lessons from the Covid War: An Investigative Report - with Charity Dean and John Barry — at Conn Ave
Our national leaders have drifted into treating the pandemic as though it were an unavoidable natural catastrophe, repeating a depressing cycle of panic followed by neglect. So a remarkable group of practitioners and scholars from many backgrounds came together determined to discover and learn lessons from this latest world war. Lessons from the Covid War is plain-spoken and clear sighted. It cuts through the enormous jumble of information to make some sense of it all and answer: What just happened to us, and why? And crucially, how, next time, could we do better? Because there will be a next time. The Covid war showed Americans that their wondrous scientific knowledge had run far ahead of their organized ability to apply it in practice. Improvising to fight this war, many Americans displayed ingenuity and dedication. But they struggled with systems that made success difficult and failure easy. This book shows how Americans can come together, learn hard truths, build on what worked, and prepare for global emergencies to come.
Philip Zelikow is the former executive director of the 9/11 Commission and the Carter-Ford Commission on Federal Election Reform. He is the White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia.
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P&P Live! Stephen Buoro — The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa - with Tope Folarin [MOVED TO VIRTUAL]
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Andrew Aziza, jokingly nicknamed Andy Africa by his beloved teacher, is a fifteen-year-old boy living in Kontagora in Northern Nigeria. He lives with his secretive mother, Gloria, and spends his days running around with his droogs, Slim and Morocca, chatting about leaving his small-town life behind and constantly contemplating the larger questions of existence. Together with his teacher Zahrah and his equally brilliant friend Fatima, a Hausa-Fulani girl who clearly has feelings for him, he discusses mathematical theorems, Black power, and what Andy has deemed “the curse of Africa.” Obsessed with American movies, pop culture, girls - and more specifically white, blonde girls, Andy falls hopelessly in love with the first one he lays eyes on: Eileen, Father McMahon's niece. But at the church party held to celebrate her arrival, multiple crises loom. The first is that an unfamiliar man there claims to be Andy's father. The second is that an anti-Christian mob has gathered, headed for the church. In the ensuing havoc and its aftermath, Andy’s life is completely turned upside down. He is forced to reckon with his identity, his complicated love for his mother, and his overpowering desire to escape the so-called Cursed Continent. The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa is a tragicomic and utterly unique novel that provides a stunning lens into contemporary African life, the complicity of the West, and the impossible challenges of coming of age in a turbulent world.
Stephen Buoro was born in Nigeria in 1993. He has received a degree in mathematics and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia as the recipient of the Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship. He has also received the Deborah Rogers Foundation Award. He lives in Norwich, United Kingdom.
Buoro will be in conversation with Tope Folarin. Folarin is a Nigerian-American writer based in Washington DC. He serves as Director of the Institute for Policy Studies and the Lannan Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Georgetown University. He is the recipient of the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Whiting Award for Fiction, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other awards. Tope also serves as a board member of the Avalon Theater in Washington DC, the Vice President of the Board of the Pen/Faulkner Foundation, and as a member of the President’s Council of Pathfinder. He was educated at Morehouse College and the University of Oxford, where he earned two Masters degrees as a Rhodes Scholar. His debut novel, A Particular Kind of Black Man, was published by Simon & Schuster.
Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal — A Wing and a Prayer: The Race to Save Our Vanishing Birds — at Conn Ave
Three years ago, headlines delivered shocking news: nearly three billion birds in North America have vanished over the past fifty years. No species has been spared, from the most delicate jeweled hummingbirds to scrappy black crows, from a rainbow of warblers to common birds such as owls and sparrows.
In a desperate race against time, scientists, conservationists, birders, wildlife officers, and philanthropists are scrambling to halt the collapse of species with bold, experimental, and sometimes risky rescue missions. High in the mountains of Hawaii, biologists are about to release clouds of laboratory-bred mosquitos in a last-ditch attempt to save Hawaii's remaining native forest birds. In Central Florida, researchers have found a way to hatch Florida Grasshopper Sparrows in captivity to rebuild a species down to its last two dozen birds. In the Sierra Nevada Mountains, a team is using artificial intelligence to save the California Spotted Owl. In North Carolina, a scientist is experimenting with genomics borrowed from human medicine to bring the long-extinct Passenger Pigeon back to life.
For the past year, veteran journalists Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal traveled more than 25,000 miles across the Americas, chronicling costly experiments, contentious politics, and new technologies to save our beloved birds from the brink of extinction. Through this compelling drama, A Wing and a Prayer offers hope and an urgent call to action: Birds are dying at an unprecedented pace. But there are encouraging breakthroughs across the hemisphere and still time to change course, if we act quickly.
Anders Gyllenhaal was an investigative reporter at The Miami Herald and executive editor at The News & Observer, The Star Tribune (Minneapolis), and The Herald. He also served as the editorial vice president for the McClatchy Company’s thirty newsrooms and 2,000 journalists. He served on the Pulitzer Prize board for nine years.
Beverly Gyllenhaal was a reporter, features writer, and food editor at The News & Observer and The Miami Herald. She coauthored a syndicated column that appeared in 100 newspapers around the US and produced three books with nearly half a million copies in print.
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Dave Barry — Swamp Story — at Conn Ave
Jesse Braddock is trapped in a tiny cabin deep in the Everglades with her infant daughter and her ex-boyfriend, a wannabe reality TV star who turned out to be a lot prettier on the outside than on the inside. Broke and desperate for a way out, Jesse stumbles across a long-lost treasure, which could solve all her problems--if she can figure out how to keep it. The problem is, some very bad men are also looking for the treasure, and they know Jesse has it. Meanwhile, Ken Bortle of Bortle Brothers Bait and Beer has hatched a scheme to lure tourists to his failing store by making viral videos of the "Everglades Melon Monster." The Monster is in fact an unemployed alcoholic newspaperman named Phil wearing a Dora the Explorer costume head. Incredibly, this plan actually works, inspiring a horde of TikTokers to swarm into the swamp in search of the monster at the same time villains are on the hunt for Jesse's treasure. Amid this mayhem, a presidential hopeful arrives in the Everglades to start his campaign. Needless to say, it does not go as planned. In fact, nothing in this story goes as planned. This is, after all, Florida.
Dave Barry is the author of more bestsellers than you can count on two hands, including Lessons from Lucy, Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys, Dave Barry Turns Forty, and Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up. A wildly popular syndicated columnist best known for his booger jokes, Barry won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He lives in Miami.
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Camille Kellogg — Just as You Are - with Susie Dumond — at Conn Ave
Liz Baker and her three roommates work at The Nether Fields, a queer magazine in New York that’s on the verge of shutting down—until it’s bought at the last minute by two wealthy lesbians. Even though Liz is eager to leave listicles behind for more meaningful writing, she knows that she’s lucky to still have a paycheck. But it’s hard to feel grateful with minority investor Daria Fitzgerald slashing budgets, cancelling bagel Fridays, and password protecting the color printer to prevent “frivolous use.” When Liz overhears Daria scoffing at her articles, she knows that it’s only a matter of her time before her impulsive mouth tells Daria off and gets herself fired. But as Liz and Daria wind up having to spend more and more time together, Liz starts to see a softer side to Daria—she’s funny, surprisingly helpful, and actually seems to like that Liz’s gender presentation varies between butch and femme. Even as the evidence that Liz can’t trust Daria piles up, it starts getting harder and harder to keep hating her—and harder and harder to resist her.
Camille Kellogg is a queer writer based in New York City, where she works as an editor for children's and young adult books. She studied English and creative writing at Middlebury College and attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference on a fiction scholarship. She's passionate about queer stories, cute dogs, and bad puns.
Kellogg will be in conversation with Susie Dumond. Dumond is a queer writer from Little Rock, Arkansas. She is a senior contributor at Book Riot, where she writes a monthly Horoscopes and Book Recommendations column, as well as various quizzes, book lists, and bookish news pieces. Susie received a bachelor of arts from the University of Tulsa and a master of arts in public policy and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies from the George Washington University. Currently, she’s probably making cupcakes at her home in Washington, D.C., with her partner, Mary, her dog, Waffles, and her cat, Maple.