Who Am I, Anyway?
Our stories impress themselves upon us, sometimes more forcefully than expected. Acclaimed authors Nadia Owusu and Kiese Laymon join us to discuss their personal stories about the push and pull of belonging, about race and identity, about home, family, trauma and the courage required to face such challenges.
| Where: | Citi Stage (Seats 1000) |
| When: | Sat, Mar 6, 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
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| Genre: | Memoir / Essays / Creative Nonfiction |
| Moderator: | Laura Maher |
Panelists
Kiese LaymonBorn and raised in Jackson, Miss., Kiese Laymon, Ottilie Schillig Professor in English and creative writing and the University of Mississippi, is the author of the novel "Long Division," the memoir "Heavy," and the essay collection "How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America....
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Nadia OwusuNadia Owusu is a Brooklyn-based writer and urban planner. She is the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award. Her first book is ”Aftershocks.” Owusu's lyric essay chapbook, “So Devilish a Fire,” was a winner of the TAR chapbook contest and was published in January 2019....
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Books:
Aftershocks
Nadia Owusu
Memoir / Essays / Creative Nonfiction
Simon & Schuster
January 2021
ISBN 9781982111229
$26.00, INSTORE
Buy nowIn the tradition of The Glass Castle, a deeply felt memoir from Whiting Award–winner Nadia Owusu about the push and pull of belonging, the seismic emotional toll of family secrets, and the heart it takes to pull through.
Young Nadia Owusu followed her father, a United Nations official, from Europe to Africa and back again. Just as she and her family settled into a new home, her father would tell them it was time to say their goodbyes. The instability wrought by Nadia’s nomadic childhood was deepened by family secrets and fractures, both lived and inherited. Her Armenian American mother, who abandoned Nadia when she was two, would periodically reappear, only to vanish again. Her father, a Ghanaian, the great hero of her life, died when she was thirteen. After his passing, Nadia’s stepmother weighed her down with a revelation that was either a bombshell secret or a lie, rife with shaming innuendo.
With these and other ruptures, Nadia arrived in New York as a young woman feeling stateless, motherless, and uncertain about her future, yet eager to find her own identity. What followed, however, were periods of depression in which she struggled to hold herself and her siblings together.
Aftershocks is the way she hauled herself from the wreckage of her life’s perpetual quaking, the means by which she has finally come to understand that the only ground firm enough to count on is the one written into existence by her own hand. More/less
How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
Essays
Kiese Laymon
Memoir / Essays / Creative Nonfiction
Simon and Schuster
November 2020
ISBN 9781982170820
Paperback, 176 pages
$16.00, OUTOFSTOCK
Buy now
