AMBER DERMONT &
JESMYN WARD
Monday
March 25, 2013
7:30 pm (doors open 6:45 pm)
Zilkha Hall, Hobby Center for the Performing Arts
800 Bagby
Directions & parking
General admission tickets: $5 BUY HERE
Learn more about tickets here.
Reading followed by an on-stage interview, book sale, and signing. To submit questions for the authors, click here.
Pre-order books by the authors through Brazos Bookstore for pickup at the event by clicking here. Books will be pre-signed whenever possible.
AMBER DERMONT made a splash in the literary world this past spring when her debut novel The Starboard Sea received rave reviews from The New York Times. An engrossing coming-of-age story set among the privileged class at a New England boarding school of last resort, the finely sculpted novel is full of astutely drawn characters and anchored by a central mystery. Janet Maslin described it as “a rich, quietly artful novel that is bound for deep water, with questions of beauty, power and spiritual navigation as its main concerns. The title refers not to the right side of a boat but to the right course through life, and the immense difficulty of finding and following it.” The novel also received the front cover review of the Sunday New York Times Book Review, which called it “captivating and inspired. . . . It doesn’t matter if you don’t know a spindrift from a seaboard—the language of sailing is lovely, both simple and elaborate, unexpectedly sexy and inexhaustibly metaphorical.” Dermont’s short stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. She earned her MFA in Fiction from The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and her PhD at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, where she received an Inprint fellowship and prize for her work. Dermont currently serves as an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College in Georgia. She will be reading from her novel and new story collection Damage Control, which comes out in March 2013.
JESMYN WARD, hailed by
Publishers Weekly as “a fresh new voice in American literature” and called “fearless and toughly lyrical” by Library Journal, won the 2011 National Book Award for her second novel Salvage the Bones. Set in the 12 days surrounding the arrival of Hurricane Katrina, BookPage describes it as “a pitch-perfect account of struggle and community in the rural South....Though the characters in Salvage the Bones face down Hurricane Katrina, the story isn’t really about the storm. It’s about people facing challenges, and how they band together to overcome adversity.” The Washington Post praised it as “masterful....has an aura of a classic about it.” Her first novel Where the Line Bleeds—honored by the Black Caucus of the National Book Awards, an Essence magazine Book Club Selection, and a finalist for both the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Virginia Commonwealth University Cabell First Novelist Award—is also set in the Gulf Coast of Mississippi where she grew up and still makes her home. Ward’s memoir, The Men We Reaped, about the loss of her brother and other men in her community, comes out in 2013. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Southern Alabama in Mobile.
LINKS:
A review of Amber Dermont's The Starboard Sea in The New York Times
An interview with Amber Dermont in Atlanta Magazine
An excerpt of Amber Dermont's The Starboard Sea
A review of The Starboard Sea and an interview with Amber Dermont in The Huffington Post
Jesmyn Ward's personal blog
Video of Jesmyn Ward accepting her National Book Award
Audio of Jesmyn Ward reading from Salvage the Bones
An article on Jesmyn Ward in the Los Angeles Times
