Category: Virtual Chats

Reader Meet Writer Presents – Connor Towne O’Neill This Tuesday

Reader Meet Writer, Southern Edition

Connor Towne O’Neill

Let us deliver authors to your living room. The next author in the Southern Edition series is Connor Towne O’Neill. Connor Towne O’Neill will be talking with us about their newest book Down Along With That Devil’s Bones and answering your questions. Connor Towne O’Neill is one of many authors we’ll be bringing into your living room.

Connor Towne O’Neill’s writing has appeared in New York magazine, Vulture, Slate, RBMA, and the Village Voice, and he works as a producer on the NPR podcast White Lies. Originally from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he lives in Auburn, Alabama, where he teaches at Auburn University and with the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project. This is his first book.

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Date: 9/29/2020
Time: 4:00:00 PM CST
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Down Along With That Devil’s Bones

In Down Along with That Devil’s Bones, journalist Connor Towne O’Neill takes a deep dive into American history, exposing the still-raging battles over monuments dedicated to one of the most notorious Confederate generals, Nathan Bedford Forrest. Through the lens of these conflicts, O’Neill examines the legacy of white supremacy in America, in a sobering and fascinating work sure to resonate with readers of Tony Horwitz, Timothy B. Tyson, and Robin DiAngelo.

When O’Neill first moved to Alabama, as a white Northerner, he felt somewhat removed from the racism Confederate monuments represented. Then one day in Selma, he stumbled across a group of citizens protecting a monument to Forrest, the officer who became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and whom William Tecumseh Sherman referred to as “that devil.” O’Neill sets off to visit other disputed memorials to Forrest across the South, talking with men and women who believe they are protecting their heritage, and those who have a different view of the man’s poisonous history.

O’Neill’s reporting and thoughtful, deeply personal analysis make it clear that white supremacy is not a regional affliction but is in fact coded into the DNA of the entire country. Down Along with That Devil’s Bones presents an important and eye-opening account of how we got from Appomattox to Charlottesville, and where, if we can truly understand and transcend our past, we could be headed next.

To see a list of all upcoming authors booked so far, click here.

Reader Meet Writer Presents – Margaret Kimberley This Thursday

Reader Meet Writer, Southern Edition

Margaret Kimberley

Let us deliver authors to your living room. The next author in the Southern Edition series is Margaret Kimberley. Margaret Kimberley will be talking with us about their newest book Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents and answering your questions. Margaret Kimberley is one of many authors we’ll be bringing into your living room.

Margaret Kimberley is a New York-based writer and activist for peace and justice issues. Dr. Cornel West has called her “one the few great truth tellers who, along with Glen Ford, Adolph Reed, Jr. and Bruce Dixon, preserved her integrity during the Obama years.” She has been an Editor and Senior Columnist for Black Agenda Report since its inception in 2006. Her work has appeared in the Dallas Morning News, Consortium News, American Herald Tribune and CounterPunch. She is a contributor to the anthology, In Defense of Julian Assange. She is a graduate of Williams College and lives in New York City.

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Date: 9/17/2020
Time: 6:00:00 PM CST
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Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents

“Margaret Kimberley gives us an intellectual gem of prophetic fire about all the U.S. presidents and their deep roots in the vicious legacy of white supremacy and predatory capitalism. Such truths seem more than most Americans can bear, though we ignore her words at our own peril!”
~ Cornel West, author of Race Matters

Prejudential is a concise, authoritative exploration of America’s relationship with race and black Americans through the lens of the presidents who are elected to represent and govern all of its people. Throughout the history of the United States, numerous presidents have been remembered as slaveholders, bigots and inciters of racial violence, but were others generally regarded as more sympathetic to the plight and interests of black Americans—such as Lincoln, FDR and Clinton—really much better? And what of all the presidents whose interactions with and impacts on the lives of black America are hardly considered at all? Over the course of 45 chapters—one for each president—Kimberley examines the condition of black America through the attitudes and actions of the highest elected official in the country. This is not meant to be a definitive examination of the topic but rather an informative and engaging guide that illustrates the merits and especially the shortcomings of even those presidents considered more progressive than their contemporaries on race issues. By casting sunlight on an aspect of American history that is largely overlooked, Prejudential aims to increase awareness in a manner that will facilitate discussion and understanding.

To see a list of all upcoming authors booked so far, click here.

Reader Meet Writer Presents – Simon Stephenson This Tuesday

Reader Meet Writer, Southern Edition

Simon Stephenson

Let us deliver authors to your living room. The next author in the Southern Edition series is Simon Stephenson. Simon Stephenson will be talking with us about their newest book Set My Heart to Five and answering your questions. Simon Stephenson is one of many authors we’ll be bringing into your living room.

Simon Stephenson previously wrote Let Not the Waves of the Sea (John Murray), a memoir about the loss of his brother in the Indian ocean tsunami. It won Best First Book at the Scottish Book Awards, was a Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4, and a Daily Telegraph Book of the Year. Since then he has been dividing his time between the UK and LA, where he works as a screenwriter, most recently at Pixar Animation Studios.

Here are the details you need:
Date: 9/15/2020
Time: 2:00:00 PM CST
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Set My Heart to Five

For fans of Fredrik Backman and Gail Honeyman, a delightfully entertaining, deceptively poignant debut novel about a human-like bot named Jared, whose emotional awakening leads him on an unforgettable quest for connection, belonging and possibly even true love.

Jared works as a dentist in small town Michigan. His life is totally normal, except for one thing. He is a bot, engineered with human DNA to look and act like a real person.

One day at a screening of classic movie, Jared feels a strange sensation around his eyes. Everyone knows that bots can’t feel emotions, but as the theater lights come on, Jared could swear he’s crying. Confused, he decides to watch more old movies to figure out what’s happening. The process leads to an emotional awakening that upends his existence. Jared, it turns out, can feel.

Overcome with a full range of emotions, and facing an imminent reset, Jared heads west, determined to forge real connections. He yearns to find his mother, the programmer who created him. He dreams of writing a screenplay that will change the world. Along the way he might even fall in love. But a bot with feelings is a dangerous proposition, and Jared’s new life could come to an end before it truly begins.

Delightfully entertaining and deceptively moving, Set My Heart to Five is a profound exploration of what makes us human, and a love letter to outsiders everywhere.

To see a list of all upcoming authors booked so far, click here.

Reader Meet Writer Presents – Daniel Nayeri

Reader Meet Writer, Southern Edition

Daniel Nayeri

Let us deliver authors to your living room. The next author in the Southern Edition series is Daniel Nayeri. Daniel Nayeri will be talking with us about their newest book Everything Sad is Untrue and answering your questions. Daniel Nayeri is one of many authors we’ll be bringing into your living room.

Daniel Nayeri was born in Iran and spent a couple of years as a refugee before immigrating to Oklahoma at age eight with his family. He is the publisher of Odd Dot, an imprint of Macmillan, making him one of the youngest publishers in the industry. He has served on the CBC diversity committee and the CBC panel committee.

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Date: 9/3/2020
Time: 6:00:00 PM CST
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Everything Sad is Untrue

At the front of a middle school classroom in Oklahoma, a boy named Khosrou (whom everyone calls “Daniel”) stands, trying to tell a story. His story. But no one believes a word he says. To them he is a dark-skinned, hairy-armed boy with a big butt whose lunch smells funny; who makes things up and talks about poop too much.
But Khosrou’s stories, stretching back years, and decades, and centuries, are beautiful, and terrifying, from the moment his family fled Iran in the middle of the night with the secret police moments behind them, back to the sad, cement refugee camps of Italy.and further back to the fields near the river Aras, where rain-soaked flowers bled red like the yolk of sunset burst over everything, and further back still to the Jasmine-scented city of Isfahan.
We bounce between a school bus of kids armed with paper clip missiles and spitballs to the heroines and heroes of Khosrou’s family’s past, who ate pastries that made people weep and cry “Akh, Tamar!” and touched carpets woven with precious gems.
Like Scheherazade in a hostile classroom, Daniel weaves a tale to save his own life: to stake his claim to the truth. And it is (a true story).
It is Daniel’s.

To see a list of all upcoming authors booked so far, click here.

Reader Meet Writer Presents – Heather Bell Adams This Thursday

Reader Meet Writer, Southern Edition

Heather Bell Adams

Let us deliver authors to your living room. The next author in the Southern Edition series is Heather Bell Adams. Heather Bell Adams will be talking with us about their newest book The Good Luck Stone and answering your questions. Heather Bell Adams is one of many authors we’ll be bringing into your living room.

Heather Bell Adams’ first novel, Maranatha Road (West Virginia University Press 2017), won the gold medal for the Southeast region in the Independent Publisher Book Awards and was named to Deep South Magazine’s Fall/Winter Reading List. Her second novel, The Good Luck Stone (Haywire Books 2020) was named to Deep South Magazine’s Summer Reading List and Most Anticipated Small Press Novel Lists for The Big Other and Buzz Feed.

Her short fiction, which has won the James Still Fiction Prize and Carrie McCray Memorial Literary Award, appears in The Thomas Wolfe Review, Atticus Review, Pembroke Magazine, Broad River Review, Clapboard House, Gravel, The Petigru Review, Pisgah Review, and elsewhere.

Originally from Hendersonville, NC, Heather lives in Raleigh with her husband, Geoff, and son, Davis. She works as a lawyer and volunteers on the Raleigh Review fiction staff.

Here are the details you need:
Date: 8/27/2020
Time: 6:00:00 PM CST
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The Good Luck Stone

Her desperate decision during World War II changed everything. Now, 70 years later, her secret is unraveling.At ninety years old, Audrey Thorpe still lives in a historic mansion on palm-tree-lined Victory Drive, determined to retain her independence. But when her health begins to fade, her family hires a part-time caretaker, Laurel. The two women seem to bond-until Audrey disappears. Unbeknownst to Laurel, Audrey has harbored a secret since her time as a nurse in the South Pacific during World War II.As the story moves between the verdant jungles of the war-torn Philippines and the glitter of modern-day Savannah, friendships new and old are tested. Along the way, Audrey grapples with one of life’s heart-wrenching truths: You can only outrun your secrets for so long.

To see a list of all upcoming authors booked so far, click here.

Reader Meet Writer Presents – Justin A. Reynolds This Thursday

Reader Meet Writer, Southern Edition

Justin A. Reynolds

Let us deliver authors to your living room. The next author in the Southern Edition series is Justin A. Reynolds. Justin A. Reynolds will be talking with us about their newest book Early Departures and answering your questions. Justin A. Reynolds is one of many authors we’ll be bringing into your living room.

Justin A. Reynolds has had a wide array of odd jobs. He was most recently a registered nurse before trading his stethoscope for a pencil, but he likes to think both instruments reveal the heart. He lives in northeast Ohio.

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Date: 8/20/2020
Time: 6:00:00 PM CST
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Early Departures

Justin A. Reynolds, author of Opposite of Always, returns with another charming and powerful YA contemporary novel with a speculative twist, perfect for fans of Nicola Yoon, Becky Albertalli, and Adam Silvera.

What if you could bring your best friend back to life–but only for a short time?

Jamal’s best friend, Q, doesn’t know that he died, and that he’s about to die . . . again. He doesn’t know that Jamal tried to save him. And that the reason they haven’t been friends for two years is because Jamal blames Q for the accident that killed his parents.

But what if Jamal could have a second chance? A new technology allows Q to be reanimated for a few weeks before he dies . . . permanently. And Q’s mom is not about to let anyone ruin this miracle by telling Q about his impending death. So how can Jamal fix everything if he can’t tell Q the truth?

Early Departures weaves together loss, grief, friendship, and love to form a wholly unique homage to the bonds that bring people together for life–and beyond.

To see a list of all upcoming authors booked so far, click here.

Reader Meet Writer Presents – Adam Rutherford This Tuesday

Reader Meet Writer, Southern Edition

Adam Rutherford

Let us deliver authors to your living room. The next author in the Southern Edition series is Adam Rutherford. Adam Rutherford will be talking with us about their newest book How to Argue With a Racist and answering your questions. Adam Rutherford is one of many authors we’ll be bringing into your living room.

Adam Rutherford is a geneticist, science writer, and broadcaster. He studied genetics at University College London, and during his PhD on the developing eye, he was part of a team that identified the first known genetic cause of a form of childhood blindness. As well as writing for the science pages of The Guardian, he has written and presented many award-winning series and programs for the BBC, including the flagship weekly Radio 4 program Inside Science, The Cell for BBC Four, and Playing God (on the rise of synthetic biology) for the leading science series Horizon. He is also the author of How to Argue With a Racist, an incisive guide to what modern genetics can and can’t tell us about human difference; The Book of Humans, a new evolutionary history that explores the profound paradox of the “human animal”; A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction; and Creation, on the origin of life and synthetic biology, which was short-listed for the Wellcome Book Prize.

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Date: 8/18/2020
Time: 2:00:00 PM CST
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How to Argue With a Racist

Race is not a biological reality.
Racism thrives on our not knowing this.
Racist pseudoscience has become so commonplace that it can be hard to spot. But its toxic effects on society are plain to see–feeding nationalism, fueling hatred, endangering lives, and corroding our discourse on everything from sports to intelligence. Even well-intentioned people repeat stereotypes based on “science,” because cutting-edge genetics are hard to grasp–and all too easy to distort. Paradoxically, these misconceptions are multiplying even as scientists make unprecedented discoveries in human genetics–findings that, when accurately understood, are powerful evidence against racism. We’ve never had clearer answers about who we are and where we come from, but this knowledge is sorely needed in our casual conversations about race.
How to Argue With a Racist emphatically dismantles outdated notions of race by illuminating what modern genetics actually can and can’t tell us about human difference. We now know that the racial categories still dividing us do not align with observable genetic differences. In fact, our differences are so minute that, most of all, they serve as evidence of our shared humanity.

To see a list of all upcoming authors booked so far, click here.

Reader Meet Writer Presents – Sarah M. Broom

Reader Meet Writer,

Sarah M. Broom

Let us deliver authors to your living room. The next author in the series is Sarah M. Broom. Sarah M. Broom will be talking with us about their newest book The Yellow House and answering your questions. Sarah M. Broom is one of many authors we’ll be bringing into your living room.

Sarah M. Broom is a writer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Oxford American, and O, The Oprah Magazine among others. A native New Orleanian, she received her Masters in Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. She was awarded a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant in 2016 and was a finalist for the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction in 2011. She has also been awarded fellowships at Djerassi Resident Artists Program and The MacDowell Colony. She lives in New York state.

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Date: 8/13/2020
Time: 6:00:00 PM CST
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The Yellow House

Winner of the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction
A New York Times Bestseller

Named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review

Named one of the “10 Best Books of 2019” by the New York Times Book Review, Seattle Times, Chicago Public Library, the Chicago Tribune, and Slate

Named a Best Book of 2019 by the Washington Post, NPR’s Book Concierge, NPR’s Fresh Air, the Guardian, BookPage, New York Public Library, and Shelf Awareness

Named a Best Memoir of the Decade by LitHub

A brilliant, haunting and unforgettable memoir from a stunning new talent about the inexorable pull of home and family, set in a shotgun house in New Orleans East.

In 1961, Sarah M. Broom’s mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant–the postwar optimism seemed assured. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah’s father Simon Broom; their combined family would eventually number twelve children. But after Simon died, six months after Sarah’s birth, the Yellow House would become Ivory Mae’s thirteenth and most unruly child.

A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America’s most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother’s struggle against a house’s entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House expands the map of New Orleans to include the stories of its lesser-known natives, guided deftly by one of its native daughters, to demonstrate how enduring drives of clan, pride, and familial love resist and defy erasure. Located in the gap between the “Big Easy” of tourist guides and the New Orleans in which Broom was raised, The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows. It is a transformative, deeply moving story from an unparalleled new voice of startling clarity, authority, and power.

To see a list of all upcoming authors booked so far, click here.

Reader Meet Writer Presents – Kim Powers This Tuesday

Reader Meet Writer, Southern Edition

Kim Powers

Let us deliver authors to your living room. The next author in the Southern Edition series is Kim Powers. Kim Powers will be talking with us about their newest book Rules for Being Dead and answering your questions. Kim Powers is one of many authors we’ll be bringing into your living room.

Kim Powers is a two-time Emmy winner and author of the novels Capote in Kansas and Dig Two Graves, as well as the memoir The History of Swimming, a Barnes & Noble Discover Award winner and Lambda Literary Award finalist for Best Memoir of the Year. He also wrote the screenplay for the festival-favorite indie film Finding North and the new play Sidekicked, a “one broad comedy” about Vivian Vance. Powers is the Senior Writer for ABC’s 20/20, part of the team that has received three consecutive Edward R. Murrow Awards. A native Texan, he received an MFA from the Yale School of Drama. In 2007, he was selected by Out Magazine for the influential “Out 100” list. He lives in Manhattan and Asbury Park, NJ.

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Date: 8/11/2020
Time: 4:00:00 PM CST
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Rules for Being Dead

It’s the late 1960s in McKinney, Texas. At the downtown theater and the local drive-in, movies–James Bond, My Fair Lady, Alfie, and Dr. Zhivago–feed the dreams and obsessions of a ten-year-old Clarke who loves Audrey, Elvis, his family, and the handsome boy in the projector booth. Then Clarke loses his beloved mother, and no one will tell him how she died. No one will tell her either. She is floating above the trees and movie screens of McKinney, trapped between life and death, searching for a glimpse of her final moments on this earth. Clarke must find the shattering truth, which haunts this darkly humorous and incredibly moving novel.

To see a list of all upcoming authors booked so far, click here.

Reader Meet Writer Presents – Odie Lindsey This Thursday

Reader Meet Writer, Southern Edition

Odie Lindsey

Let us deliver authors to your living room. The next author in the Southern Edition series is Odie Lindsey. Odie Lindsey will be talking with us about their newest book Some Go Home and answering your questions. Odie Lindsey is one of many authors we’ll be bringing into your living room.

Odie Lindsey is the author of Some Go Home and We Come to Our Senses: Stories. He received an NEA fellowship for combat veterans, holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MA from the University of Mississippi, and is writer-in-residence at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

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Date: 8/6/2020
Time: 6:00:00 PM CST
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Some Go Home

An Iraq War veteran turned small-town homemaker, Colleen works hard to keep her deployment behind her–until pregnancy brings her buried trauma to the surface. She hides her mounting anxiety from her husband, Derby, who is in turn preoccupied with the retrial of his father, Hare Hobbs, for a decades-old, civil rights-era murder. Colleen and Derby’s community, including the descendants of the murder victim, still grapple with the fallout; corrections officer Doc and his wife, Jessica, have built their life in the shadow of this violent act.

As a media frenzy builds, questions of Hare’s guilt–and of the townsfolks’ potential complicity in the crime–only magnify the ever-present tensions of class and race, tied always to the land and who can call it their own. At the center of these lingering questions is Wallis House, an antebellum estate that has recently passed to new hands. A brick-and-mortar representation of a town trying to erase its past, Wallis House is both the jewel of a gentrifying 2010s Pitchlynn, and the scene of the 1964 murder itself. When fresh violence erupts on the property grounds, the battle between old Pitchlynn and new, between memorial site and moving on, forces a reckoning and irreparable loss.

Some Go Home twists together personal and collective history, binding north Mississippi to northside Chicago, in a richly textured, explosive depiction of both the American South and our larger cultural legacy.

To see a list of all upcoming authors booked so far, click here.