title: Well-Read Black Girl Book Club: What We Lose
start: 2017-08-27
start time: 13:00
end time: 15:00
venue: New Women Space
city: Brooklyn (NY)
country: US
coordinates: 40.7162, -73.9421
tags: FeminismInNY NewWomenSpace feminism feminismo feminismus gender genderstudies non-binary nonbinary queer womenrights womenspace
links:
Facebook event page https://www.facebook.com/events/868625303311436/
description:
NOW READING
What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons
LOCATION
New Woman Space is located conveniently in North Brooklyn, two blocks from the Graham L, a 10-minute walk from the Metropolitan L, G subway station.
Please RSVP. Refreshments will be provided. Questions? Tweet @wellreadblkgirl!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Zinzi Clemmons was raised in Philadelphia by a South African mother and an American father. A graduate of Brown and Columbia, her writing has appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, The Paris Review Daily, Transition, and elsewhere. She is a cofounder and former publisher of Apogee Journal and a contributing editor to Literary Hub. She has been in residence at the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Dar al-Ma'mûn in Marrakech, Morocco. Clemmons lives in Los Angeles with her husband, where she teaches at The Colburn Conservatory and Occidental College.
ABOUT THE BOOK
One of the New York Times, Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Redbook, Marie Claire, Essence, Houston Chronicle, LA Daily News, Nylon, and Elle’s Books to Read This Summer
Raised in Pennsylvania, Thandi views the world of her mother’s childhood in Johannesburg as both impossibly distant and ever present. She is an outsider wherever she goes, caught between being black and white, American and not. She tries to connect these dislocated pieces of her life, and as her mother succumbs to cancer, Thandi searches for an anchor—someone, or something, to love.
In arresting and unsettling prose, we watch Thandi’s life unfold, from losing her mother and learning to live without the person who has most profoundly shaped her existence, to her own encounters with romance and unexpected motherhood. Through exquisite and emotional vignettes, Clemmons creates a stunning portrayal of what it means to choose to live, after loss. An elegiac distillation, at once intellectual and visceral, of a young woman’s understanding of absence and identity that spans continents and decades, What We Lose heralds the arrival of a virtuosic new voice in fiction.
Read an excerpt from What We Lose via Electric Literature.