Gregory Pardlo will read from his acclaimed memoir Air Traffic: A Memoir of Ambition and Manhood in America, and Digest, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2015.
Air Traffic is a richly realized, deeply felt ode to one man's remarkable father, to fatherhood, and to the frustrating yet redemptive ties of family. It is also a scrupulous, searing examination of how manhood can be fashioned in our cultural landscape.
Pardlo has won many awards and his writings has been published in various journals. He lives in Brooklyn with his family.
"Riveting....Sparkles with lyricism and imaginative muscle....Pardlo shares these reflections in prose that seems powerful and effortless." --Jabari Asim, The Washington Post
Award-winning author Alice Mattison will read from her dazzling novel, Conscience, one of the Washington Post’s 2018 50 Notable Books of Fiction.
Decades after the Vietnam War, Conscience tells the story of a married couple living in New Haven re-examining their past through the filter of a present new conflict.
Mattison has written seven novels, four books of stories, and a collection of poems. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She has taught at Brooklyn College, Yale University, and the MFA program at Bennington College.
"Alice Mattison's new novel wrestles with the irreducibly complex demands of having a conscience in an age of political depravity." --The Washington Post
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The Meetinghouse Readings in Canaan are held at 7:30 pm on four Thursday evenings in July and early August. Free and open to the public, no reservations are needed. (Please, no infants, toddlers or squirmers.)
Moderated by Phil Pochoda, the sponsors include James Laffan, Esq., Caldwell Estate Planning, Wachovia Securities, and Mascoma Savings Bank. The Norwich Bookstore will sell current and past books by each author at the Meetinghouse. Many of the books can also be purchased at the bookstore in advance, to be signed by the authors.
The readings are held at the 1793 Meetinghouse in Canaan, N.H.’s Historic District, located opposite the beach on Canaan Street Lake. Take Route 4 to the blinking light in Canaan; 2 miles up Canaan Street to the Old Meetinghouse. For more information, visit meetinghouse.us or call the Canaan Town Library (603) 523-9650.
From the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning poet: an extraordinary memoir and blistering meditation on fatherhood, race, addiction, and ambition.
Acclaimed author Alice Mattison’s new novel explores the hard choices a young woman and her friends made decades earlier at the height of the Vietnam War.
Decades ago in Brooklyn, three girls demonstrated against the Vietnam War. Helen became a violent revolutionary and was killed in a protest in 1970.
A targeted and insightful guide to the stages of writing fiction and memoir without falling into common traps, while wisely navigating the writing life, from an award-winning author and longtime teacher
“A book-length master class.” —The Atlantic
From Epicurus to Sam Cooke, the Daily News to Roots, Digest draws from the present and the past to form an intellectual, American identity. In poems that forge their own styles and strategies, we experience dialogues between the written word and other art forms.
On the day they first meet in a city playground, Deborah Laidlaw lends Toby Ruben a book called Trolley Girl, the memoir of a forgotten trolley strike in the 1920s, written by the sister of a fiery Jewish revolutionary who played an important, ultimately tragic role in the events. Young mothers with babies, Toby and Deborah become instant friends.